Tamta Khalvashi is Associate Professor at Ilia State University. She holds her doctorate from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Khalvashi has contributed to the knowledge of urban anthropology and anthropology of borders of the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. Her research has covered a wide spectrum of anthropological themes, ranging from nationalist cosmologies, Muslim and Christian religious conversions, affective forms of marginality, and global ramifications of Georgia’s recent neoliberal urban transformation. She has published on issues of infrastructure and breakdown, photography and political change, and urban space and destruction. Drawing on richly detailed ethnographic research in the Georgian Black Sea city of Batumi, she is currently completing the manuscript for Peripheries of Optimism: Affective Economies of Indebtedness in Georgia and explores theoretical questions about optimism, indebtedness and space in the context of dramatic political restructuring.
Khalvashi is also Research Associate of the Black Sea Network Initiative at Columbia University and co-directs a documentary film on the future port city of Anaklia currently under construction on the Georgian Black Sea coast.
Tamta, took part in the panel “Post Soviet Transformations” during the symposium.