CoMoDe

Almost a year after his personal meeting with the editor of Transfers, Egor’s article was published in the journal. Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall, but you can definitely reach out to the author and request a PDF. The paper focuses on the search for the source of epistemic superiority and engages with recent debates around the concept of technocracy. It draws on theoretical insights from Thorstein Veblen’s oeuvre and findings from anarchist thinkers. The reintroduction of a trolleybus service in Prague is offered as an empirical illustration. The paper’s central argument is that the procedures of knowledge production are the main source of epistemic superiority. This shifts the focus from an analytical value in itself to the executive mechanisms that enable a specific type of expertise.

Wladimir Sgibnev and Egor Muleev applied for the modest funding provided by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundation for a study of informal and shared mobilities in Central Asia and South-East Europe. And they won! They are now working to establish collaboration between different scholars in order to prepare the report by the end of the year.

Last Tuesday on the 8th of July, the CoMoDe group hosted a workshop organised by our dear fellow Bermet Borubaeva. We had a quite diverse number of participants with very various backgrounds in presence and online. In the beginning Bermet shared her year-long experience of resisting a debt-driven sustainable transition in Bishkek’s public transport system, which ultimately resulted in the city having no sustainable transport. We discussed various ways of organising protests, mapped all the relevant stakeholders, and brainstormed novel ways of presenting the issue. The event went very well, and Bermet cooked us a fabulous plov for dinner afterwards.

Read more about the developments in Bishkek and local activist structures on: https://bishkeksmog.info/2025/06/05/ifl/