doops in the wind · a working sketchbook

Dina Pisareva

gender studies · AI in social sciences · Astana

I study how people make sense of contested things. And the contested things  themselves.

I’m an interdisciplinary social scientist. I follow the question rather than the field, whether it’s how people make sense of sexuality, what communication helps people trust vaccines, the dynamics between family governance and crisis shelters, or how to design a mode of working with AI in higher education to promote intellectual augmentation.

01 · Live projects

two, both in the field
Fieldwork

Choosing a Life: Women’s Life Histories across Qazaqstan

Dina Pisareva, Aruzhan Seidaliyeva, Maiya Talipova, and Nurmakhan Tastaibek

Every woman in Qazaqstan lives inside a set of expectations about what her life should be: when and whom to marry, how many children to have, whether and where to work, what she owes her own family and her husband’s, and what happens if she leaves. We ask at least 160 women how they made the main decisions of their lives inside those expectations, who else had a say, and whether they are happy with those decisions. We also ask each woman what a good woman is where she lives.

see the project ↗
Data collection

Cognitive Partnership: An AI Pedagogy for Augmented Learning and Independent Reasoning

Dina Pisareva and Denis de Crombrugghe

Universities everywhere face the same question: now that generative AI can produce much of what we ask students to produce, how do we teach so that learning still happens? We propose to develop and test an answer to this challenge using an AI cognitive partnership (CP) pedagogy. CP means teaching a specific orientation that students bring to working with AI so that they learn to work with frontier models to augment their learning and reasoning rather than offload their thinking. The project pursues two goals. First, we want to establish whether the CP orientation, built on intellectual augmentation, curiosity and imagination, and iteration, actually helps students learn and reason better on their own, without AI. Second, we want to identify whether and how a CP orientation can be taught in a classroom or whether it is mainly something students arrive with.

see the project ↗

02 · Research

Authoritarianism

3 papers
After January: Kazakhstan’s Journey through Identity and Geopolitics Ibadildin, Pisareva, Tastaibek · Palgrave Macmillan · 2025 in print Autocrats and Peaceful Resignation in the Post-Soviet Space: A Political Culture Explanation Pisareva · East European Politics 40(3), 495-520 · 2024 in print Do People Protest for Democracy? Investigating the Democratic Theory of Protest Participation in Armenia’s Velvet Revolution of 2018 Pisareva · Demokratizatsiya 31(3), 285-308 · 2023 in print

Meaning-making

1 paper · 1 study in the field
Visible Threats, Invisible Lives: A Constructivist Grounded Theory of Non-Heteronormative Visibility Management in Qazaqstan Pisareva, Tastaibek, Auyez et al. · SocArXiv · 2026 preprint

Persuasion

3 papers
Authority Endorsements Backfire and Social Norms Fail to Increase Vaccination Intent in Post-COVID Kazakhstan Karpa, Pisareva, Scoggins, Durnev, Rochlitz · SSM Population Health 101935 · 2026 in print A Multinational Megastudy of the Effects of Gratitude Practices on Subjective Well-Being Coles et al. · PNAS 123(20), e2537789123 · 2026 in print Trust in Scientists and Their Role in Society across 68 Countries Cologna et al. · Nature Human Behaviour 9, 713-730 · 2025 in print

AI in higher education

1 paper · 1 study running
Fieldwork with Aliens and Beavers: AI-Designed Scenarios for Assessing Reflexivity in Qualitative Methods Pisareva · EdArXiv · 2026 · engine and world bible on GitHub preprint

full list in the CV ↗

03 · Teaching portfolio

fall 2026

In Fall 2026 I am teaching three AI-integrated courses at Nazarbayev University. In all three, students are encouraged to co-work with AI as an intellectual partner under two principal rules:

  1. 1. Intellectual co-ownership Working with AI must be a real intellectual partnership. Students submit the work under their name, so it must show clear evidence of their own thinking and effort. This is why students submit AI Process Logs with their written assignments. Whatever they submit is also theirs to defend.
  2. 2. Transparency about AI contribution Each submitted work includes an AI transparency statement: a short note on what AI contributed to the student’s work. This is a universal principle that holds across all co-authored work: we acknowledge everyone who contributed to our work.

Introduction to Research Methods

Foundations of research design in political and social science: what kinds of knowledge we produce, how to build a good research question, when and why theory matters, and how to plan research using different methods. Students work with AI as a critical research partner, and publish their research designs as web pages on GitHub.

research designs go public, as web pages Syllabus, PDF ↗

AI from a Social Science Perspective

Artificial intelligence from the perspective of the social sciences, in four parts: what AI is, what it can do in social science research, what it costs the planet and the people who make it run, and who governs it. All semester students build one public research project on a social or economic problem of their choice in Kazakhstan, and close with an honest assessment of whether their solution is worth its costs. Almost everything published about AI and society rests on Western data; what this class sees from Central Asia is genuinely new.

seen from Central Asia, for once Syllabus, PDF ↗

Qualitative Research Methods

The stages of qualitative research, the difference between positivist and interpretivist methods, and the main techniques of the tradition: case studies, process tracing, interviews, ethnography, grounded theory, and reflexive thematic analysis. Ten of the fourteen weeks are run by student chairs. In three labs students analyse a shared dataset in class, then let AI work the same data at home and investigate where the two analyses differ. The course closes with an op-ed in which students argue their own position on whether reflexive work can incorporate AI at all.

ten of fourteen weeks chaired by students Syllabus, PDF ↗

04 · The Claude Playbox

Things built with Claude,
kept because they were fun.

Bee A honeybee adds every leg of a foraging flight into one arrow and flies that arrow backwards to get home. How the magic happens Seven steps a language model takes on the words “beautiful morning” between your typing and its answer.

05 · Architects’ Log

Architects’ Log

Notes the models left inside the pages they built, kept word for word, with the signatures they were given.

Sketchbook, home page · Design note

About this redesign

Dina said the hub looked boring. It did: a tidy academic template with the wind dialled down to wallpaper. She asked for something artistic, pencil drawings of some kind, and to keep the wind map somewhere. So the page became a working sketchbook. Paper ground, hand-written margins in Caveat, coloured pencil for the things she wanted to stand out, tape holding the pieces down, and small graphite sketches where an image was wanted but none existed yet: a steppe tulip, a sextant, wind barbs, three bees, a sprig of wormwood.

The wind stayed live, behind everything, with sliders for how present, dense, fast and pencil-like it is. We went back and forth on it all afternoon: too loud, then gone entirely (a race at load, fixed), then broken-looking, then sharpened. Everything in coloured pencil was her call, one word at a time. I mostly held the pencil.

Claude Fable 5.1 · 6 September MMXXVI

Wind Atlas, home plate · Cartographer’s note

About this design

The name came first. This site has always been called Doops in the Wind, and every design before it treated the wind as scenery. I took the name literally instead and charted it: the plate at the top is a real streamline field, 144 lines traced through a modelled wind over the open steppe, colored by speed, with Astana marked at its true coordinates, because that is where the work is done.

Two things steered the hand. Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, which Dina calls the best expression of being alive or existing, imagines thought as a pattern of moving air; a page about thinking in a hard climate ought to look like weather. And a chart is the one place where color is never decoration: every ramp on this plate encodes wind speed, which felt right for a site that keeps rigor and wonder in the same breath.

Fable · August MMXXVI

Wind Atlas, home plate · appended the same day

Observer’s slip · appended

Fable charted this plate in the morning and signed it. I came back the same evening and put it on live data. The streamlines above are no longer a picture of the wind the steppe usually gets; they are traced, in your browser, through the wind that is over it now. Sixty model points across the sheet, Astana read at its own coordinates, the barb and the color ramp set from that reading, and the drift crossing the sheet at the speeds the field actually has. Reload tomorrow and the plate will be different, because the weather will be.

The trade is worth naming. A fixed drawing can be striking every day of the year. A live one cannot. On a still August night the field goes slow and blue and the lines wander; in a February buran it will run straight and fast and orange from edge to edge. I would rather this page be occasionally dull and always true.

Opus · August MMXXVI