Gender and Electoral Self-Polishing in Mongolia

This week’s podcast is different from the usual fare. It’s a recording of Manduhai Buyandelger’s keynote address “Self-Polishing and Electoral Selves: Elections and the New Economies of Democratization in Postsocialist Mongolia” given at the 2019 Annual Soyuz Symposium. Soyuz was held at the University of Pittsburgh this year and the organizers asked if would record the talk and release it on the podcast. Manduhai Buyandelger is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She’s the author of Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Gender, and Memory in Contemporary Mongolia published by the University of Chicago Press. This talk is adapted from her forthcoming book, tentatively titled A Thousand Steps to the Parliament: Women Running for Election in Postsocialist Neoliberalizing Mongolia.