Center for Research on Social Memory
Our Center conducts research on how groups and societies make sense of their pasts. Focusing on East-Central Europe, we cover a broad range of topics including the memories of wars and socio-political transformations; memory politics and history policies; mnemonic structures and memory activists. We try to understand how history has been used, and for what purposes, by politicians, educators, heritage practitioners and other memory makers.
The Center is hosted by the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw and continues work of Social Memory Laboratory created in 2010.
Publications
Our publications, mainly in Polish and English, cover wide range of uses of the past in nation-building, religious, cultural, and economic processes in East-Central Europe.
Projects
The researchers of the Center pursue individual projects of their own choice and have been also involved in several international and national collaborative projects.
Education
Each year we offer several courses related to memory studies and cultural heritage for BA and MA students at the University of Warsaw (in Polish or English). We also collaborate with MA and doctoral students in our research projects.
Events
Peripheral Shame: Affective City and the Nation on the Margins of Post-Colonial Georgia
2024-11-19
– 2024-11-19
09:30
– 12:00
- ONLINE
- English
We kindly invite you to a seminar with Tamta Khalvashi "Peripheral Shame: Affective City and the Nation on the Margins of Post-Colonial Georgia". The meeting will be chaired by Zuzanna Bogumił.
The seminar will take place online, 19 November at 9:30am CET.
Please register in order to participate: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJAofuCspz4pHdNazRZtsXGoVAD...Abstract
Based on the forthcoming book Peripheral Shame: Affective City and the Nation on the Margins of Post-Colonial Georgia, Tamta Khalvashi explores post-Soviet Georgia as a unique postcolonial space that gives rise to an affective condition of peripheral shame. By mixing family archives and autoethnographic reflections with traditional fieldwork material, she follows glimpses of this shame in various urban settings, from the monuments on the move to indebted houses or from unburied bodies of Soviet mass killings to awkward coexistence of different religious and ethnic groups in urban courtyards of Batumi on the western edge of Georgia. Khalvashi offers a new way of conceiving shame, not just as a feeling of stratified geopolitical, social, or personal relations but as an impulse to straddle with or repair ongoing peripheral frictions. She thus approaches shame as a productive feeling that gives rise to inconvenient coexistence, which is the only way to live and survive on the margins of the postcolonial world.
Based on the forthcoming book Peripheral Shame: Affective City and the Nation on the Margins of Post-Colonial Georgia, Tamta Khalvashi explores post-Soviet Georgia as a unique postcolonial space that gives rise to an affective condition of peripheral shame. By mixing family archives and autoethnographic reflections with traditional fieldwork material, she follows glimpses of this shame in various urban settings, from the monuments on the move to indebted houses or from unburied bodies of Soviet mass killings to awkward coexistence of different religious and ethnic groups in urban courtyards of Batumi on the western edge of Georgia. Khalvashi offers a new way of conceiving shame, not just as a feeling of stratified geopolitical, social, or personal relations but as an impulse to straddle with or repair ongoing peripheral frictions. She thus approaches shame as a productive feeling that gives rise to inconvenient coexistence, which is the only way to live and survive on the margins of the postcolonial world.
Bio
Tamta Khalvashi is a professor of Anthropology and the Head of the PhD Program of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University in Georgia. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Copenhagen University (2015). She has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships from the Fulbright Program at New York University, Department of Anthropology (2016-2017) and Cornell University, the Society for the Humanities (2022-23). Her research interests overlap experimental anthropology, the interdisciplinary field of affect theory, and cultural anthropology, focusing on postsocialist transformations, peripheral histories, marginal social identities, space, and materiality. Her article Horizons of Medea: Economies and Cosmologies of Dispossession in Georgia (Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018) has been awarded Honorary Mention from Soyuz (Postsocialist Cultural Studies Research Network of the American Anthropological Association) in the Article Price Annual Competition (2018). Currently, Khalvashi is finalising her book Peripheral Shame. She is the author of A Sea of Transience: Politics, Poetics and Aesthetics Along the Black Sea Coast (with Martin Demant Frederiksen) (Berghahn 2023).
Tamta Khalvashi is a professor of Anthropology and the Head of the PhD Program of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University in Georgia. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Copenhagen University (2015). She has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships from the Fulbright Program at New York University, Department of Anthropology (2016-2017) and Cornell University, the Society for the Humanities (2022-23). Her research interests overlap experimental anthropology, the interdisciplinary field of affect theory, and cultural anthropology, focusing on postsocialist transformations, peripheral histories, marginal social identities, space, and materiality. Her article Horizons of Medea: Economies and Cosmologies of Dispossession in Georgia (Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018) has been awarded Honorary Mention from Soyuz (Postsocialist Cultural Studies Research Network of the American Anthropological Association) in the Article Price Annual Competition (2018). Currently, Khalvashi is finalising her book Peripheral Shame. She is the author of A Sea of Transience: Politics, Poetics and Aesthetics Along the Black Sea Coast (with Martin Demant Frederiksen) (Berghahn 2023).
About the seminar series:
Series „Postcolonial perspectives–postdependance entanglements” is organized in frames of two research projects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland “Remembering Soviet repressions in the post-multiple colonial RussianFar East”,no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and SocialMemory and the Post-ImperialRussianHeritage in Poland no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.
Series „Postcolonial perspectives–postdependance entanglements” is organized in frames of two research projects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland “Remembering Soviet repressions in the post-multiple colonial RussianFar East”,no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and SocialMemory and the Post-ImperialRussianHeritage in Poland no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.
About Us
We are a group of interdisciplinary scholars working at the intersection of sociology, history, social anthropology, and cultural studies.
