Tbilisi as an urban assemblage

Tbilisi from 1934 -2018 Tbilisi & The Open City Hidden Power of Trees Nostalgia
Principal investigator Ketevan Gurchiani works as a Professor of Cultural Studies and Religion at Ilia State University in Tbilisi and is a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities at the Goethe University Frankfurt in project “Religious Positioning”. After studying Classics in Georgia and Germany she moved to the cultural anthropology. Her shift to cultural anthropology has come through the support of Open Society Foundation Faculty Development Fellowships at both UCLA and Columbia University and later at New York University through the generosity Rustaveli Foundation funding and the Global Publication Award. Ketevan Gurchiani is mostly interested in studying different aspects of everyday life with special focus on everyday religion and urban space. Among others she studied negotiations between clergy and believers as part of the informality, the identity as a category of practice and schools as Thirdspace. Her special focus are theorizations on space and place as constructed and constructing. Right now, Ketevan Gurchiani is part of an interdisciplinary research project Tbilisi as formal and Informal Space. Ketevan Gurchiani has experience in leading research projects successfully. Her most recent accomplished project was an anthropological study of lived religion in Georgia (Rustaveli Foundation 2015-2018, amount 131 000 GEL)
Coordinator of the project, Ia Kupatadze works as an Associate professor at School of Technology, Architecture program at Ili State University. Her personal interest is sustainable architecture and urban developments. Her dissertation dealt with issues such as: what changes has sustainable architecture development brought in construction field; is architecture less aesthetically pleasing but more environmentally friendly or vice versa, or
Researcher Tamta Khalvashi, Professor in Anthropology at Ilia State University, obtained her PhD degree from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen in 2015. Before she was a visiting research student at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Tamta worked as Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Anthropology, New York University between 2016-2017. At the same time, she served as Assistant Professor at Free University of Tbilisi. Along with academic work, she is in charge of developing PhD program in anthropology at Ilia State
Professor Paul Manning received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 2001. He has taught anthropology at Northern Illinois University, Reed College, and Bard College. His research focuses on linguistic and semiotic anthropology in Wales and Georgia. He has done fieldwork on Georgian speaking populations in Georgia and Russia. Urban anthropology is one of his core interests and research areas. His publications include: (with Zaza Shatirishvili). Why are the dolls laughing? Tbilisi culture between intelligentsia culture and socialist labor. In Tsypylma Darieva et al. (eds.), Urban Spaces after