Dr. Otruba will discuss her research and traveling photovoice exhibition. This exhibition features a curated sample of photographs taken by ten internally displaced persons (IDPs), who were forced to flee the 1992-1993 Georgian-Abkhaz war. The pictures capture these IDPs’ three-decade-long experience living under abject and decaying “temporary" housing conditions in the former Soviet spa resort of Tskaltubo, Republic of Georgia. The photographs were collected as part of a feminist visual ethnography project studying the emotional impact of housing infrastructure quality on IDPs’ sense of identity, dignity, personhood, agency, and sense of futurity.
Otruba's research interests include critical geopolitics, border and migration studies, political violence, architecture and urban planning, and posthumanist approaches to political ecology. Through critical, feminist and post/decolonial frameworks, her scholarship contributes embodied and emotional insight into the study of violent geographies.
Sponsored by the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies
