Zhazira Bekzhanova

Zhazira Bekzhanova

Zhazira Bekzhanova is a lecturer at Aktobe Regional Zhubanov University and a research assistant at Nazarbayev University in a project on gender and schooling in Kazakhstan. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, discourse studies with the focus on social (in)equalities. She obtained her MA degree in Language and Linguistics from Lancaster University in 2019, and she is a Bolashaq presidential scholarship holder (2017). Zhazira’s MA dissertation addresses the problems of latinisation of the Kazakh alphabet and its further influence on social cohesion in her home country. At Zhubanov University Zhazira teaches English and linguistic courses for future language instructors.

Research Project

Illustration by Mereizhan Bekbauova

Gender, language and social inequalities in the textbooks on the History of Kazakhstan

The research explores how gender and social inequities are produced by a language in school textbooks on the History of Kazakhstan. Particularly, textbooks in the Kazakh and Russian languages are compared. Using the multimodal approach to discourse analysis, we investigate how texts and images interplay to represent gender for school children.