About the project:

This project explores the Black Sea as a space of connectivity and exchange. It brings together four scholars from Ilia State University, Tamta Khalvashi (Principal Investigator), Elene Gavashelishvili, Mariam Darchiashvili and Nuka Abakelia for a sustained reflection on various patterns of circulation —of people, goods, ideas, and imaginaries— through infrastructures and narratives across and around the Black Sea. Rather than taking the regional perspective that tends to essentialize the Black Sea, the project focuses on temporary connections, mobilities, seaside socialities and transient communities that come together through various infrastructures and narratives, specifically on the Georgian Black Sea. The analytical focus of the project – infrastructure and narratives – refers to basic forms of human expression that externalize our need for interconnectedness. While infrastructure enables material connectivity across space, narratives produce symbolic interconnectedness across time. Understanding the Black Sea as a space of infrastructural and symbolic connectivity is important, as it plays an important role in contemporary geopolitical, national, and communal imaginations. 

Publications related to this project: 

• A Sea of Transience: Politics, Poetics and Aesthetics Along the Black Sea Coast. New York and Oxford: Berghahn (2023). Editors Tamta Khalvashi and Martin Demant Frederiksen. https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KhalvashiSea 
• Transient Togetherness in Batumi: Being a Sailor’s Wife. 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). An author, Elene Gavashelishvili. https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KhalvashiSea 
• 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). An author, Tamta Khalvashi. https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KhalvashiSea
• Informal Networks in the Black Sea Region: The Case of Georgian Muslim Boarding Houses. Journal of Religion in Europe 14, no. 3-4 (2021): 297-322. An author, Mariam Darchiashvili. https://brill.com/view/journals/jre/14/3-4/article-p297_5.xml?language=en 
• Synagogue as Infrastructure in Everyday Life of Batumi Jewish Community. Journal of Religion in Europe 14, no. 3-4 (2021): 323–338. https://brill.com/view/journals/jre/14/3-4/article-p323_6.xml?language=en&ebody=abstract%2Fexcerpt