LAVENDER LANGUAGES INSTITUT: Hafiz Boboyorov “Living dangerously: How LGBTQI+ people secure their everyday life in the urban space of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan”, 2 December, 2022, 7:00pm

Securityscapes are physically built and mentally imagined spaces securing individual or collective life from what people perceive as existential dangers. These dangers reflect both objective and imagined conditions threatening individual and collective extinction. The lecture looks at how local LGBTQI+ communities shape and maintain their securityscapes through languages, identities, memories, networks and physical structures of the urban spaces in Kyrgyzstan after adopted by Kyrgyz parliaments laws against “gay propaganda” in 2013 and 2014.

Hafiz Boboyorov holds PhD from Bonn University (2013), whose thesis on “Collective Identities and Patronage Networks in Southern Tajikistan” was published in 2013 (Berlin: Lit. Verlag). He writes about socio-cultural changes and transformations, religious movements, labour migration and minorities in the post-Soviet states of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.