Power, Memory, and Modernity in Dushanbe

Talk description:

This talk explores the rapid, large-scale urban transformation of Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Over the past decade, the city has experienced the widespread demolition of Soviet-era buildings and the simultaneous rise of state-sponsored and private developments. Driven by a convergence of actors—the Tajik state, foreign developers, and the increasing influence of China—this physical restructuring coincides with intensifying debates around decolonization, the persistence of Soviet nostalgia, and the reimagination of national identity.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork, including interviews with residents and planners, photographic documentation, and a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of state media, this presentation unpacks the conflict over power, memory, and modernity embedded in Dushanbe's changing form. It argues that the city’s transformation is a hybrid process: a fusion of urban commodification, geopolitical shifts, and a strategic state-led nation-building project. The resulting aesthetic reflects an eclectic, contested landscape that fuses top-down state control, aspirations of Gulf futurism, and the forces of global capitalism.

Crucially, the talk highlights how residents assert agency within this space, often mobilizing Soviet nostalgia and collective memory to contest the changing cityscape. These acts of meaning-making range from narrating the loss of Soviet-era spaces to actively resisting displacement or, conversely, embracing the new modernity. Ultimately, this study provides a deeper engagement with the everyday experiences of these geopolitical and material shifts, analyzing the current forces shaping Central Asia rather than perpetually defining the region solely through the lens of its Soviet past.

Speaker:

Tahmina Inoyatova

Tahmina Inoyatova is a PhD candidate at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her research investigates the discursive construction of power through media and built environments, and the ways in which identity and power are mutually constituted in the post-Soviet context and beyond.

Her scholarship has been published in the Routledge Handbook of Asian Cities (2023), the anthology Mapping the Media and Communication Landscape of Central Asia (2023), as well as in Al Jazeera and The Diplomat. Tahmina regularly presents her work at major international conferences, such as ASEEES and IAMCR. She holds an MA in Communication Studies from Peking University in Beijing, China, and a BA in Linguistics from the Russian-Tajik Slavic University in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

Discussant:

Dr. Eugene McCann

Eugene McCann is a Professor of Geography at SFU.  He researches policy mobilities, harm reduction, urban politics, public space, and gentrification. He has published in numerous journals and is co-editor, with Kevin Ward, of Mobile Urbanism: Cities & Policymaking in the Global Age (Minnesota, 2011), Cities & Social Change, with Ronan Paddison (Sage, 2014), and is co-author, with Andy Jonas and Mary Thomas, of Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction (Wiley, 2015).  He is working on a book, under contract with Minnesota, on how the harm reduction movement is sustained by circulating counterhegemonic ideas.  He is managing editor of EPC: Politics & Space, a journal of critical research on the relations between the political and the spatial.

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