Ainur Begim’s received the 2019 Soyuz Article Prize for her article entitled "How to retire like a Soviet person: informality, household finances, and kinship in financialized Kazakhstan", which was published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
The Soyuz Article Prize is awarded for the best article related to the culture, history, politics of postsocialism published by a junior scholar in the preceding year. Begim received the prize at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in Vancouver, Canada.
Begim's award-winning article explores how citizens of modern Kazakhstan seek to achieve socialist-era security through Western financial technologies. By attending to the emergent space between idealized socialism and capitalism, this article grounds finance in kin relations, gender inequities, and local economic and political histories, and explores how socialist conceptions of retirement and money management are reimagined and practised in relation to state-led financialization.
The Soyuz Article Prize recognizes significant contributions to the advancement of scholarly understandings of postsocialism, broadly defined. It is awarded annually by Soyuz: The Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies, which is formally constituted as the Post-Communist Cultural Studies Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and is also recognized as an official unit of the Association for Slavic, East European Studies and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).