Saida Daukeyeva is a Georg Forster Research Fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin. A music historian and ethnographer with expertise in the Middle East and Central Asia, she published the book Philosophy of Music by Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi (2002) and coedited the textbook The Music of Central Asia (2016). Her current research explores issues of identity, gender, social memory, mobility, spirituality, and politics in relation to Kazakh instrumental performance and ritual practice in western Mongolia and Kazakhstan.