Research, communication and development in a remote mountain context in Central Asia Aline Rosset, University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan

1. Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan and the UCA

1. Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia Bishkek Naryn

2. Research-relevant challenges in Central Asia Research, communication and outreach challenges: Insignificant priority to international community Non hegemonic languages: diversity, characters, lack of resources/publications, low abilities to use knowledge available in English Remoteness and topography Increasing centre-periphery gradient within countries Lack of cooperation and information sharing, limited freedom Not enough funds for research, donor dependency, concurrence Focus issues of the KMEECS project in Kyrgyzstan: Education and the environment Decreasing quality of education, lack of context-based learning experiences Increasing environmental challenges, but poor public awareness Lack of locally relevant environmental data

3. The Kyrgyz Mountains Environmental Education and Citizen Science project (KMEECS) Goal: Pilot the introduction of a Citizen Science-based Environmental Education curriculum in rural schools of Kyrgyzstan‘s Naryn province. Participatory development of resources for teachers (syllabus, toolboxes, manual) on water quality and phenology as a climate change indicator Collect local-level environmental data through Citizen Science Elaborate/adapt simple tools for data management and visualisation Analysis of the network of stakeholders involved in the project, their roles, resources and how they are impacted by the project activities and outcomes

4. Communication channels for varying audiences Local level: Naryn and the pilot schools (in Kyrgyz)  Teaching resources and tools  Photo exhibition: children’s perspective  Locally used social media in Kyrgyz  Visualization of collected data for every village  Local capacity development through training of teachers National/regional level: Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia (in Russian and Kyrgyz)  Presentation of educational resources to policy makers  Project report  Presentation of photo exhibition on national level  Social Media in Russian and Kyrgyz  Data collected through citizen science will be freely available on online platforms  Conference/workshop presentations  Training for Central Asian research fellows on OCSD International level and OCSDNet (in English)  Project blog and publishing on OCSDNet Forum  Experiment with videos, animations or podcasts for communicating results  Data collected through citizen science will be freely available on online platforms  Presentations at conferences and other events  Use of UCA and CAMP Alatoo communication channels for a broader reach

Local level: eBilim Mobile Digital Library National level: Coalition for Open Education in Kyrgyzstan 5. Best practices: knowledge management in CA International/regional level: K-Link – Linking, sharing and managing knowledge on climate change in Central Asia

Thank you for your attention. I am looking forward to your comments and ideas to strengthen scholarly communication in remote contexts!