Yurt Jurt

In this episode of Yurt Jurt, host Diana Kudaibergen speaks with environmental engineer and Indigenous rights activist Viliuia Choinova about decolonisation, extractivism, and the realities of living within and resisting the Russian state. Viliuia speaks about land not as an abstract concept, but as a material and political space—one shaped by resource extraction, environmental destruction, and unequal power relations.

The conversation confronts difficult questions: What does it mean to call Russia a federation when many of its regions lack real autonomy? How are Indigenous communities disproportionately affected by extractivism and militarisation? Viliuia also reflects on the increasing pressures faced by activists, the targeting of Indigenous populations in mobilization efforts, and the challenges of bringing these issues to international platforms, including UN spaces. At the same time, she offers a powerful vision of decolonisation as both resistance and possibility, a chance to reclaim language, culture, and political futures beyond imperial structures.

This episode is a bold and urgent conversation about empire, identity, and the struggle for self-determination in the 21st century.

In this episode of Yurt Jurt, host Diana T. Kudaibergen speaks with political sociologist Nodira Kholmatova about how migration, power, and inequality shape the lived realities of Central Asians across borders. Working at the intersection of comparative political economy and migration studies, Nodira unpacks how migration governance produces social hierarchies and how migrants and their families navigate, resist, and rework these systems. Drawing on research spanning Central Asia, Russia, Serbia, and beyond, the conversation explores the racialization of Central Asian migrants, deportation regimes, and the enduring legacies of empire in contemporary mobility.Together, Diana and Nodira reflect on what concepts like race, ethnicity, and decolonisation mean in and for Central Asia today. What does it mean to think from the region, rather than about it? How do postcolonial dynamics shape migration, belonging, and exclusion? And what responsibilities do scholars have toward the communities they study?

In this episode of the Yurt Jurt Podcast, host Diana Kudaibergen speaks with Seseg Jigjitova, a Buryat activist, illustrator, and writer based in Berlin, about decolonial thought, memory, and the power of storytelling.Seseg reflects on how her personal journey into decolonial activism began within her own family. Growing up in Kazakhstan, her father made a deliberate effort to preserve the Buryat language and traditions at home, a quiet form of resistance that later shaped her political and artistic work. Through illustration and visual storytelling, Seseg documents experiences of racism faced by Indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities from North Asia and Russia.
The conversation also explores her book Deep Freeze. This visual and autobiographical project traces three interconnected layers: unanswered questions from the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the personal and political awakening. The title reflects how historical trauma, colonial violence, and suppressed questions remained “frozen” for decades before surfacing.
Diana and Seseg discuss broader themes, including Soviet nostalgia, the romanticization of the USSR in Western intellectual circles, generational colonial trauma, and the challenges Indigenous communities face in building solidarity. They also reflect on the psychological impact of colonialism, the need for culturally aware therapy, and how art can become a powerful tool for documenting lived experience and reclaiming history.
Tune in for a thoughtful conversation on decolonization, memory, identity, and the role of art in telling stories that were long kept silent.

In this episode of Yurt Jurt, Diana Kudaibergen is joined by philosopher Tereza Hendl, whose work focuses on global health justice and decolonial thought, for a timely and unflinching conversation about the political moment we are living through. Together, they unpack the global rise of the far-right and examine how contemporary systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and Western-centrism continue to shape whose suffering is recognized, and whose is erased. They interrogate the dangerous narrative that formerly colonized peoples should feel “grateful” for modernization, a claim that glosses over histories of trauma, extraction, cultural erasure, and violence.

The discussion turns inward as well: the left is not immune from critique. Tereza and Diana explore how certain strands of progressive politics fall into inconsistency and exceptionalism, arguing that principles applied to Western imperialism somehow cannot be applied elsewhere. They reflect on how parts of the left slip into authoritarian reasoning, or romanticize state power, including the persistent whitewashing of the USSR.

They examine the myth of the “friendship of nations” in the Soviet Union, and how the narrative that “Russia was less severe than the West” distorts accountability and risks normalizing or relativizing violence. This is a conversation about refusing propaganda, rejecting exceptionalism, and building a politics that does not reproduce the very harms it claims to oppose.

In this episode of Yurt Jurt, host Diana Kudaibergen speaks with Dinara Rasuleva - a Tatar poetess, writer, artist, and musician whose work sits at the crossroads of decolonial writing, experimental performance art, and multilingual expression.Until 2022, Dinara wrote exclusively in Russian. That shift became a turning point: she began to work consciously across languages, questioning the imperial connotations embedded in dominant literary forms and searching for new ways to write that feel ethically and politically grounded. Her recent Lostlingual project Travmagochi marks this transition - a work shaped by rupture, memory, and linguistic choice.
Together, Diana and Dinara reflect on what it means to praise and preserve native languages in contexts shaped by empire and erasure. They discuss the emotional and political weight of returning to a mother tongue, the challenges of passing native languages on to future generations, and the freedom and responsibility of writing in Russian, Tatar, English, and German.
This conversation is about language as inheritance, resistance, and creative experimentation - and about choosing to write in ways that refuse silence, hierarchy, and linguistic loss.