research

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I am an anthropologist studying the experience of long-term conflict and uncertainty. My research is based in Georgia's contested borderland with Abkhazia, and aims to bring novel directions to long standing issues of conflict and displacement through more recent theoretical and methodological strands that capture material, spatial, and environmental relations of human experience.
 

My current book project, Contested Movements: Material and Temporal Anatomy of Life in a Conflict Zone, examines the everyday eventfulness and materiality of a "frozen conflict." Scholars and policy makers have categorized the series of conflicts in the former USSR as “frozen,” by which they mean ones characterized by a situation of stalemate and lack of progress towards a settlement. The Georgia-Abkhazia conflict is one of them, but, like other spaces of long-term conflict, it is anything but static. My project focuses on this conflict zone, on a de facto borderland where a community of displaced Georgians—from Gali region—have made lives on both sides of a militarized divide by navigating protracted ambivalence and contingency for almost three decades. Through a study of contingency and cross-border mobility, Contested Movements investigates this overlooked dynamism and its everyday materiality.

 

I am working on a new postdoctoral project, Contested Lands of Nutella: Climate Change, Conflict, and Cultivation in Georgia’s Borderlands. Building on my doctoral research, I study how displaced communities in the Gali region sustain their lives and livelihoods through hazelnut farming while facing the overlapping pressures of conflict, displacement, and accelerating climate change. Once shaped by Soviet-era plantations that collapsed after the Union’s fall, the land has since been remade through small orchards that now provide a vital cash crop. Hazelnuts connect local households, criminal networks, and global companies like Ferrero, while orchards themselves straddle borders marked by fences and trenches. Using innovative methods such as collaborative mapping, augmented reality, and community-driven storytelling, my project explores how climate impacts—flooding, invasive pests, shifting ecologies—reshape everyday life and future possibilities in this fragile borderland.