Stu McLaughlin Awarded Boren Fellowship to Study in Kazakhstan

CREEES MA student Stu McLaughlin has been selected to receive the prestigious Boren Fellowship to pursue an intensive, advanced Kazakh language program at Nazarbayev University in Nur-Sultan. McLaughlin will take courses conducted entirely in Kazakh, like Kazakh Language for Civil Service, Kazakh Diplomacy, Business Kazakh, as well as Eurasian Studies courses and Kazakh Culture and Literature.

McLaughlin previously studied at Nazarbayev University in 2015 on a FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) fellowship. He is returning with an advanced knowledge of Kazakh, which is, as he states, “a significant departure from the times I have been there before with only intermediate Russian.” McLaughlin, who is known as a prolific language-learner among the CREEES community, has been studying Kazakh intensively through independent study at Stanford as part of his MA program, in addition to taking advanced Russian.

“I will be doing everything possible to experience the unmediated effects of multilingualism and its effect on identity, researching these aspects of language and history, pluralism, as well as doing outreach projects with the American Corner spaces in different cities in Kazakhstan,” said McLaughlin, whose capstone research focuses on this topic. His thesis, entitled "Oz Tilin Bilu: Kazakh Identity and Trilingualism in an Educational Context," analyzes the status of the Kazakh language in Kazakh society since independence and explores the educational reform structures instated to reverse the cultural and educational mergers of values through Russian-only instruction during the Soviet period. 

A priority of McLaughlin’s will be to use Kazakh in his day-to-day interactions, “even if other people prefer to speak English with me, because the modern diplomatic and cultural genome of post-colonial spaces needs ideological currency and capital in more nationals seeing their languages represented and studied.” 

The Boren Fellowship is named for David L. Boren, a U.S. senator who authored legislation that created the National Security Education Program. This program and the Institute of International Education, which administers the awards, share the goal of fostering goodwill and cultural exchange with nations of interest to the United States. Upon completion of the Boren, recipients are obligated to work for the United States government for one year. For McLaughlin, the fellowship and the immersive opportunity it offers is a way to explore a career in diplomacy and potentially to further research on identity and sociolinguistics.

Though plans could change as international travel restrictions evolve during the coronavirus pandemic, as of now, Boren recipients across the country are expecting to travel to participate in their respective programs in 2021.

The award is a welcome surprise to McLaughlin: “I am excited, nervous, determined, and a mix of other feelings that don't lend themselves to words...In short, I can't wait for people to watch me struggling to speak Kazakh, because it exchanges factual eloquence for ideological eloquence and establishes buy-in for mutual interaction.”