Yurt Jurt

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.

In this episode of the Jurt Podcast, host Diana Kudaibergen is joined by writer and poet Egana Djabbarova for an intimate conversation about language, literature, and self-formation. Egana reflects on her books and poetic practice, exploring how language became a foundation for building her subjectivity and a powerful tool for self-reflection and decolonization. She speaks about writing not only as artistic expression, but as a way of reclaiming voice, memory, and agency within and against dominant narratives.The conversation also turns to the importance of theory for emerging writers. Egana emphasizes why reading theoretical and critical studies matters, and how feminist, postcolonial, and philosophical texts have deeply shaped her own work and thinking. Egana also shares her experience of criticism and resistance after depicting the Russian language and Russian-speaking space through the perspective of a migrant family, shaped by bazaars, communal apartments, precarity, and everyday discrimination. She reflects on why such perspectives are often dismissed, and why it is crucial to continue writing from lived, marginalized positions.
This episode is a reflection on writing as practice, language as power, and literature as a space for re-imagining identity and belonging.

In this episode of Yurt Jurt, host Diana Kudaibergen speaks with Denis Esakov, a linguist and activist from Kyrgyzstan and a member of De_colonialanguage, a Berlin-based initiative working at the intersection of language, power, and decolonial practice.

Denis reflects on how colonial and imperial histories continue to shape everyday speech, naming practices, and ideas of “normative” language in post-imperial contexts. The conversation explores De:coloniaLanguage as both an initiative and a method, one that questions whose voices are legitimized, whose are erased, and how language can be reclaimed as a tool of agency rather than control.

The episode also touches on the Open Space Museum, where language, memory, and public knowledge intersect through open, participatory formats that challenge traditional institutional authority. Together, Diana and Denis discuss how museums, archives, and linguistic practices can become sites of resistance, care, and re-imagining futures beyond colonial frames. This episode invites listeners to think of language not as neutral, but as something we actively choose, contest, and transform.