Nana's ongoing PhD research project builds on the links between the nature, state and property regimes in post-socialist context. Specifically, she looks at the new arrangement and negotiations of property rights and obligations between the state and the citizen in the aftermath of environmental disasters. While under the Soviet regime, the highlanders in the Republic of Georgia used to receive alternative housing for state-owned property damaged by a landslide, the privatization of state-owned assets after the Rose Revolution in 2003 reorganized the ownership rights and responsibilities between the state and the citizen. However, despite the neoliberal reconfiguration of the state as a “protector of private ownership rights,” the property rights of the disaster-affected people are far from guaranteed. While the state remains the primary addressee for the disaster-affected people to compensate for the properties lost due to the environmental disasters, state authorities adopt a hands-off approach to what they consider a ‘private’ matter. By drawing on the relational anthropology of the state and combining ethnographic and historical approaches, I aim to study how “property ownership rights” are constructed and enacted between the state and the citizen in the aftermath of a disaster.
Nana's work combines archival and ethnographic research with visual methods, primarily photography and filmmaking. She has a background in psychology and later defended her MA thesis with distinction in 2021 at CEU (Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology) by exploring the events of 1992-93 in Abkhazia and analysed generational transmission of collective memories of war and exile among Georgian IDPs. Aside from academic work, Nana has also worked on and directed documentary films.
Research Interests:
Political ecology; Migration; Anthropology of the state; Historical anthropology; Housing and property regimes; Post-Socialist and Post-Colonial dialogue; Visual anthropology.
Visual Work:
Your Delivery Is on Its Way (2022) - https://chaikhana.media/en/stories/1361/your-delivery-is-on-its-way
Blockade of Artsakh (2023) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KA3HRPtxHI&t=24s