Biography
Alexander Maier is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He studies the moral and political economies of labor migration in postsocialist Central Asia, where the social and economic dislocations of the Soviet Union’s violent collapse propelled former collective farmers into precarious circuits of informal transnational labor. His ethnographic research is concerned with the political logics, structures of desire, and semiotic ideologies that shape illegalized migrant workers’ practices of sociality and the ethical imaginaries they bring to questions of labor, obligation, and uncertainty. Alexander's research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the ZEIT STIFTUNG BUCERIUS. He is the 2025-26 Paloheimo Fellow at the School for Advanced Research.
