On October 27, the Center for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University and IRECA-Tbilisi (Institut français de recherche sur l’Europe orientale, le Caucase et l’Asie du nord) will hold a one-day workshop on mobility.
In recent years, Georgia and Armenia have increasingly become major (epicenters) hubs of migration. Once countries people largely emigrated from, they are now also emerging as significant destinations — for those displaced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, migrants fleeing conflicts in the Middle East, international labor workers, and students arriving for higher education.
Building on the outcomes of a joint Franco-Georgian project on exile, while expanding its scope to broader migration dynamics, the workshop brings together anthropologists and social scientists to examine mobility alongside its constraints, new opportunities, and the visible and invisible barriers it creates, as seen from the perspectives of different groups. Its central focus is the multifaceted nature of migration in the Caucasus: airports and border checkpoints as spaces of both friction and opportunity, as well as states of uncertainty and liminality spanning labor, criminality, belonging, parallel existence, concealment, and disclosure. The presentations explore the migration of people, ideas, spaces, and tastes — and the forms of solidarity, hostility or invisibility that emerge through this process.
