PhD students of Social and cultural anthropology at Ilia State University are organizing the panel at the XVIII ASIAC Annual Conference at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in December 2024.

This year’s ASIAC conference will examine various aspects of connections, mobilities, and infrastructures in Central Asia and the Caucasus, including, but not limited to, studies on trade routes, migration patterns, technological advancements, urban development, cultural, religious, and artistic diffusion, and linguistic encounters.

Panel Title: The Fluidity of Infrastructure: Emotions, Bodies and Social Transformations

Panel Description

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in researching infrastructures within the field of anthropology. This interest has led to a challenge and diversification of traditional methods and approaches used to study infrastructure. Innovative approaches and experiments have also emerged, offering different ways to understand and theorize about infrastructure.

As argued by Keller Easterling the radical changes are written in the language of infrastructural technologies (2014). After the fall of the Soviet Union, large infrastructural projects became the central instrument for the change and new state formation, however, consequent economic deregulation, maximization of resource extraction, and unequal distribution of the resources led to asymmetrical developments and disempowerment of the local communities creating not only left-behind places but left-behind people and communities. In the wake of the infrastructure of the powerful, new types of infrastructures emerge – the infrastructure of the powerless – as the ways of living in stuckness between post-soviet ruinations and economic transition. This is when people create, transform, and spread new types of informal, material, and immaterial, emotional or sense-based infrastructure as the informal way of self-organizing and life-making.

Accordingly, this panel aims to examine forms of infrastructure that go beyond being merely created and built by those in power, rather it focuses on infrastructure that is self-created and self-producing, viewing it not as a static phenomenon, but as a dynamic process. This process involves various materials, mobilities, emotions, and senses that play a role in the gathering and transmission of cultures, hopes, and despairs. The panel invites researchers to explore the diverse and innovative forms of infrastructure. It encourages us to consider the different material and immaterial infrastructures that are intertwined with social and cultural relations, as well as social transformations.

Panel Participants:

Ketevan Lapachi, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ilia State University.
Hair as a Commodity: The Infrastructure of Hair Trade in Georgia

Esma Berikishvili, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ilia State University
Navigating Ruins: The Emergence of Informal Labour within Post-Soviet Infrastructure in Georgia

Lika Jalagania, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ilia State University
Infrastructure of Sociality: Rioni Valley Movement and Protest that Flows

Dato Laghidze, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ilia State University
Kutaisi Airport: Everyday Migration and Mobility in Post-Soviet Georgia

Mariam Urdia, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ilia State University
Emerging Nostalgia: The Transformed Materiality of a ‘Lost’ River’s Infrastructure

The Chair: Tamta Tatarashvili (She/Her), Doctoral Student, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ilia State University