Khalvashi Tamta
Ilia State University, Room E248, Cholokashvili 3/5 Avenue, Tbilisi 0162, Georgia
Direction:Anthropology
Position:Full Professor
Tamta Khalvashi received her doctoral degree from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen in 2015. In 2009-2010, she was a Chevening Scholar at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Between 2016-2017, Tamta worked as a Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Anthropology, New York University, while also serving as assistant professor of anthropology at Free University of Tbilisi from 2015 to 2018. In 2018, Tamta became Associate Professor of anthropology at Ilia State University with an aim to develop a PhD program in anthropology. Since 2020 she is Professor of anthropology and a head of the PhD program in Social and Cultural Anthropology, while also serving as a core member of a collaborative Black Sea Networks Initiative at Columbia University.
Her research to date has explored affect and emotions in the domain of city, politics and infrastructure. Recently her research interests also include experimental ethnographic and interdisciplinary approaches to affect and emotion that combine anthropology with multimedia ethnography and documentary film-making. She has published on issues of shame and peripherality, dispossession and affect, infrastructure and breakdown, photography and urban change. Her article “The Horizons of Medea: Economies and Cosmologies of Dispossession in Georgia” (published in Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute) was given an Honorable Mention at Soyuz’s (Postsocialist Cultural Studies) annual article price in 2018.
Drawing on richly detailed ethnographic research in the Georgian Black Sea city of Batumi, Khalvashi is currently completing the manuscript Peripheral Affect: City, Shame and Marginality in Georgia that explores theoretical questions about affect, marginality and peripheral urban lives in the Black Sea city of Batumi. Based on family visual archives and new visual material gathered in Anaklia, she also continues working on a documentary film Adrift, which is an autobiographical experiment and reflection about spatial and temporal transformation of the Black Sea.
Scientific interests / research interests
Cities, infrastructures; affect; peripherality; shame; experimental ethnographic methods; interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropological theory, multimedia ethnography and documentary film-making; Georgia, Caucasus, the Black Sea region, and the postsocialist world.
- Books
(ed. with Martin Demant Frederiksen). A Sea of Transience: Politics, Poetics and Aesthetics Along the Black Sea Coast. New York and Oxford: Berghahn (2023).
- Articles
Urban Gleaning: Collection, Repair and Artisanship in the Infrastructural Ruins of Tbilisi (forthcoming in Georgian and English).
Ascending Order: Georgia’s Coin-operated Lifts. The Architectural Review. February, Issue 1454 (2019).
Available in Georgian at: https://indigo.com.ge/articles/rogor-moxvde-zevit
The Horizons of Medea: Economies and Cosmologies of Dispossession in Georgia. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute. 24(4) (2018).
- Chapters
Makeshift Boats: Transience, Turbulence and the Sea of Mourning. In: Khalvashi, Tamta and Martin Demant Frederiksen (eds.): A Sea of Transience: Politics, Poetics and Aesthetics Along the Black Sea Coast. New York and Oxford: Berghahn (2023).
(with Paul Manning). Human Devils: Affects and Specters of Alterity in the Eerie Cities of Georgia. In: Frederiksen, Martin Demant and Ida Harboe Knudsen (eds.): Modern Folk Devils: Contemporary Constructions of Evil. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press (2021). Short version available in Georgian at: https://indigo.com.ge/articles/adamiani-avsulebi-saqartvelos-shemzarav-qalaqebshi
A Ride on the Elevator: Infrastructures of Brokenness and Repair in Georgia. In: Martinez, Francisco and Patrick Laviolette (eds.): Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic Responses. London: Berghahn Books (2019).
- Films and Video Installations
(co-director with Zaza Khalvashi) Drawing Lots (84, Georgia/Lithuania). Production: BAFIS, Tremora, Nushi Films (2023). Select Screening: World Premier, Rotterdam Film Festival, Netherlands 2023.
The Jarti Gleaners (A collective Video Installation, 3 min loop, 2021). Select Screening: Art Exhibition for the ‘Emptiness: Ways of Seeing’ conference. Available at: https://emptiness.eu/field-reports/a-collective-video-collage-the-jarti-gleaners/
Current Courses |
Course Catalog |
|---|---|
| Space, Materiality and Affect |
Anthropological Methods |