CRRC, ARISC and American Councils present the 9th talk of the Fall 2015 Works-in-Progress season:

"The Elastic Geography of Borderization and Creeping Occupation in Georgia"
Ariel Otruba, Rutgers University

Wednesday, November 18, 2015 at 6:30pm
EPF/CRRC-Georgia, Kavsadze St. 3, Tbilisi

The goal of this presentation is to introduce my dissertation research, which investigates the “borderization” and “creeping occupation” of Georgia’s South Ossetian Administrative Boundary Line (ABL) by Russian border guards. The emphasis of this project is placed on community security and the experiences and hardships incurred by the installation of barbed-wire fences and signposts, surveillance and administrative detention. Based on the early stages of my research, I will discuss the elastic geography of the ABL in order to explore preliminary insights on the role of nonrecognition politics and the strategic leveraging and maneuvering of the seeming ambiguity of the ABL’s location. Using a feminist approach to political geography, the overarching design and objectives of this research are to uncover and expose embodied and local accounts of the lived geopolitics of border securitization in Georgia.

Ariel Otruba is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. Her scholarly interests include geographies of conflict and violence, border studies, postcolonial development and feminist approaches to critical geopolitics. Ariel holds a MA in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from Arcadia University and a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from Juniata College.

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W-i-P is an ongoing academic discussion series based in Tbilisi, Georgia, that takes place at the Eurasian Partnership Foundation at Kavsadze St. 3. It is co-organized by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC), the American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC). All of the talks are free and open to the public.

The purpose of the W-i-P series is to provide support and productive criticism to those researching and developing academic projects pertaining the Caucasus region.

Would you like to present at one of the W-i-P sessions? Send an e-mail to natia@crrccenters.org.