New Academic Publication: “Reclaiming Time, Reclaiming Space” — Decolonial Feminist Leadership in Kazakhstan’s Creative Industries

A new research article by NURCE scholars has been published in Gender, Work & Organization, one of the leading international journals in the field of gender studies and organisational research. The article is co-authored by Dr. Shumaila Yousafzai and Alua Nurbay from the Nazarbayev University Research Centre for Entrepreneurship, Dr. Rana Zayadin from the Sussex Business School at the University of Sussex (UK), and Dr. Muzhar Javed from Rabat Business School in Morocco.
Titled “Reclaiming Time, Reclaiming Space: Decolonial Feminist Leadership in the Creative Industries of Post-Soviet Kazakhstan,” the article examines a question that sits at the intersection of gender, culture, and economic agency: can leadership within the creative industries transcend market logics to become an act of cultural reclamation and collective sovereignty?
Drawing on 21 in-depth interviews with women-led ventures operating across Kazakhstan’s creative sector — including fashion, traditional crafts, gastronomy, media, and cultural production — the study develops a three-layer process model that captures how Kazakh women entrepreneurs engage in cultural reclamation and community revitalisation through their enterprises. The three layers are described as: Rediscovering the Self Through Cultural Memory, Creating Relational Infrastructures of Care, and Embodying Rooted Enterprise.

The research introduces the concept of decolonial feminist leadership to explore how these women navigate and challenge the dual pressures of post-Soviet modernity and market-driven individualism. Rather than adopting leadership models imported from Western business traditions, the entrepreneurs documented in this study draw on inherited cultural knowledge, communal care, and place-based identity to build enterprises that are simultaneously economically active and culturally meaningful.

The study illustrates how temporal sovereignty, community-based leadership, and distributed cultural stewardship subvert market-driven expectations of growth. Employing a decolonial feminist lens, the findings reveal how these women transform entrepreneurship into a practice of collective memory preservation and economic sovereignty, crafting spaces of resistance within a rapidly modernising economy.

The article extends existing theories of leadership by foregrounding time as a site of political struggle and collective agency as a driver of cultural survival, offering pathways for rethinking leadership in marginalised contexts globally. The article was received in May 2025, revised in October 2025, and accepted in February 2026.
This publication is part of a broader body of scholarship produced by NURCE that situates entrepreneurship research within debates on decolonisation, cultural continuity, and gender justice in Central Asia and beyond.