Otruba, A. (2022) No (Wo)man’s Land: Risking Detention Along the South Ossetian Administrative Boundary Line. In Diener, A.C. & Hagen, J. (Eds.), Invisible Borders in Very BorderedWorld: Geographies of Power, Mobility, and Belonging. New York, NY: Routledge.

This chapter appears in the Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen’s forthcoming edited volume, Invisible Borders in Very Bordered World: Geographies of Power, Mobility, and Belonging. This chapter examines the arbitrary detention of Georgian villagers living adjacent to the Georgian-South Ossetian Administrative Boundary Line. Intimate and emotional stories of border transgression are used to explore, not just what the borderization by the Russian FSB is, but how it comes to work. I argue that arbitrary detention transforms bodies into agents of territoriality and materializations of a shifting border regime. Representing striking trends in border securitization globally, I use arbitrary detentions to explore how the exercise of state power becomes malleable and movable as it is tethered to the body, rather than exercised solely through fixed, territorial markers. Moreover, by examining the dynamics of gendered relations of this embodied border, I’m able to show how border violence shapes emerging forms of traumatic masculinity. The chapter works to show how men’s stories and performances of risking, confronting, and evading arbitrary detention reveal a gendered geopolitical violence as much as mundane resistance to the emasculating effects of the cartographic anxieties produced by the Russian enforced border regime.

Otruba, A. (2019). The violent geography of borderization. [Doctoral dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey]. School of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-jx20-8f46

Borderland communities unequally and disproportionately suffer at the altar of geopolitics. Rather than the periphery, borderlands are the epicenter of territorial conflict and contests over sovereignty. This is evident in the Republic of Georgia after the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, where the Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation began incrementally and unilaterally demarcating sections of the boundary line to the disputed and unrecognized territory of South Ossetia. This dissertation uses a feminist geopolitics approach to critically examine the violent geography of this borderization process. In addition to performing de facto sovereignty, borderization is theorized as a biopolitical tool of leverage. Qualitative mixed methods and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in a series of “conflict-affected villages” adjacent to the South Ossetian Administrative Boundary Line reveal how the uncertainties of the elastic border impacts the in/security of rural populations, whose pasturelands, homes, and social worlds are now bifurcated by the hardening of this dividing line. Two in-depth empirical chapters illustrate the embodied and emotional experiences of border violence. The first chapter shows how borderization transforms borderland villages into a "neitherland," which is a type of zone of abandonment. Through an emphasis on gendered mobilities, the second chapter demonstrates how ambiguously demarcated sections of the boundary imperil men vis-à-vis women, putting them at risk of arbitrary detention by the Russian-backed security regime. Attention to the issue of restricted freedom of movement and how men confront the border regime exposes an emerging form of traumatic masculinity, reinforcing an understanding of border violence as a gendered phenomenon.

**Isaacs, J.R., Otruba, A. (2019). Guest Introduction: More-than-human contact zones. Environment and Planning. E, Nature and Space (Print), 2(4), 697–711. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619855369**

Mary Louise Pratt used the term “contact zones” to describe those spaces where “cultures, meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today”. Building on three sessions at the 2017 American Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting, this special section features articles which apply Pratt’s concepts to environmental research. We argue that these articles demonstrate a “more-than-human ‘contact’ approach” to (1) better account for nonhuman agency by multiplying perspectives, (2) intervene in cases of violence and injustice, and (3) decolonize knowledge/production. Included are empirical case studies which describe encounters with the nonhuman; these include a postcolonial reading of the BBC’s Blue Planet II, a feminist science study of migratory shorebird conservation on New Jersey’s Delaware Bayshore, and political ecologies of prescribed forest burns by Parks Canada and tidal energy production in the Bay of Fundy. These articles broaden the definitions of “contact” and “justice” as they direct critical attention to the politics of environmental knowledge production, technoscientific means of understanding and managing the living environment, and forms of resistance to the exclusive governance of “wild” spaces. They present sites of environmental management and exploration as places of transformation, co-presence, unpredictability, and often intimate violence. The section demonstrates how political ecologies and more-than-human geographies expand Pratt’s “contact” perspective. An afterword is provided by Mary Louise Pratt.

Isaacs, J.R. & Otruba, A. (2021). Animality/Coloniality: COVID-19 and the Animal Question. In Hovorka, A.J., McCubbin, Van Patter, L. (Eds.), A Research Agenda for Animal Geographies. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN: 978 1 78897 998 6

Joining efforts to “decolonize geography”, we offer ‘animality/coloniality’ as a heuristic device for analyzing asymmetrical power relations between humans and nonhumanity. The case of COVID-19 is used to demonstrate the complexity, problems, and dangers of defining and deploying the category of ‘animal’. By illustrating how competing ideas of animality are worked through each other in understandings of and responses to zoonotic viruses, we suggest that delinking animality/coloniality should begin with an embrace of the ‘alien’ Other as a pathogenic constituency. While the perennial Animal question remains an important driver of new research in animal geographies, we caution that it should be taken up with reflexive, critical attention to one’s political purpose and situated location within (colonial) knowledge production.

Khabbaz, T., Otruba, A., Evans, H. (2021). Black Bodies and the Role of Schools in Sex Trafficking Prevention. In The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-39666-4_113-1

Human trafficking is widely regarded by experts today as “modern slavery.” Research consistently reveals that survivors of the sex trade are disproportionately women of color in the United States. Such racial disparities are explained by a long history of structural racism and inequality resultant of colonialism. Colonial knowledge production systems are responsible for producing and maintaining anti-black sexual archetypes premised on the pornographic objectification of Black women’s bodies. The hypersexual scripting and adultification of the Black body help to explain why sex trafficking impacts Black girls at higher rates compared to other groups. This also explains why Black youth are less likely to be perceived as victims. In this chapter, we connect the disproportionate impact of sex trafficking to reporting barriers and the often harsher, exclusionary discipline and punitive treatment of Black female youth experienced in the K-12 setting. Although sex trafficking awareness among educators is improving in the United States, we call attention to the pivotal role that educational leaders can play in the prevention of sex trafficking by working in collaboration with the community and local stakeholders to create a shift in culture, response, and policy.

Otruba, A. (In Progress). Decay as Slow Violence in Georgia’s Abandoned Soviet Spas.

During the Soviet era hundreds of thousands of people traveled to bathe in the radon-carbonate springs in the resort town of Tskaltubo, Georgia. Today the ruins of these neoclassical sanatoriums are ostensibly “abandoned” and crumbling under the weight of time. Although no longer operational, the decomposing remains of a once-luxurious Soviet spa town are now inhabited with thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict from the early 1990s. This paper examines how the material conditions of decay constitutes slow violence and the temporal dispersion of war’s capacity to harm repeatedly over time. Reading the peripheralizing processes of displacement as extraction shows how uninhabitable living conditions are an assault on dignity, belonging, and futurity. A feminist attention to the spatial temporalities of violence for IDPs in collective centers in Georgia makes this an important contribution to the emotional turn in political ecology in postsocialist Eurasia.

Otruba, A., Dzotsenidze, N., Orjonikidze, M., & Kekenadze, N. (In Progress). CARELESS Infrastructures of Resettlement in Georgia.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reports a 103 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. Of those, 53.2 million are characterized as internally displaced persons (IDPs). In the South Caucasus, over a million people live in protracted and precarious displacement situations because of armed conflict and ecological disaster. The Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazian, and South Ossetian conflicts, all resulted in a massive displacement of civilians. In the Republic of Georgia, IDPs equal 286,811 people out of a total population of ~3.7 million. These IDPs include two major groups: first, those newly displaced from the 2008 Russian-Ossetian-Georgian war and second, those “old” case load IDPs from the early 1990s. The many struggles of IDPs in Georgia has been well documented in the scholarly literature. This research has exposed issues related to poor labor market outcomes, loss of educational opportunities, poverty, disability, substance abuse, as well as psychological and physical health problems. Some of this research also concerns the question of durable housing and the marginalizing impact of collective centers. In this paper, we focus on a group of IDPs from Abkhazia that were resettled in the city of Tskaltubo following the thirteen-month Abkhaz-Georgian war in 1992-1993. For thirty years, many of these IDPs inhabited the decomposing remains of once-luxurious Soviet sanitoria buildings before being relocated into new “European standard” high-rises on the outskirts of the city. This paper asks about how the intimate lives of these Tskaltubo IDPs have been transformed by the receipt of these new apartments. To answer this question, this paper draws upon findings from a feminist visual ethnography project conducted between 2021-2022, which studied the emotional impact of infrastructure disrepair on IDPs’ sense of identity, dignity, and personhood. Interviews from this project show that the receipt of new apartments has been generally welcome if not emotionally transformative, especially after a long and arduous wait. Nonetheless, many IDPs remain worried about spatial justice and the ability of the Georgian government to deliver on its 2014 promise to create “safe and dignified living conditions for IDPs before their return to their places of permanent residence.” This paper brings critical attention to issues of intimacy related to the IDP resettlement process by examining IDP concerns about the monitoring and apartment lottery system; the reasonable right to privacy (especially in small apartments with mix-gender/multigenerational households); the ability to afford basic needs and properly host guests; having access communal spaces; and private property ownership. By emphasizing the connections between gender and infrastructural politics, this research expands upon a burgeoning literature in political and urban geography which shows how “urban infrastructures can enable and embody multiple forms of violence against women; from the spectacular and immediate, to the slow, everyday and intimate” (Datta & Ahmed, 2020).

Otruba, A. (forthcoming). Queering Veganism: Food Nationalism as a Frontier of Anti-Genderism in Georgia. In Fábián, K. (Ed.) The War on Gender and The Gender of War in Central and Eastern Europe. Lexington Books.

Owners of the Kiwi Café in Tbilisi, Georgia opened with the goal of raising awareness of alternative ways of eating and consuming. The non-profit community vegan café, formerly located in Tbilisi’s Old Town, was the first of its kind. This popular social meeting space and site of counterculture espouses progressive causes such as environmentalism, animal rights, and equality. In May 2016 after just a year in business, more than a dozen “sausage-wielding extremists” stormed the café in an act of intimidation, bearing strings of sausages round their necks and carrying slabs of meat on skewers. A scuffle ensued after this group of men began throwing chunks of meat and fish onto patrons' plates. Employees identified the group as members of a far-right, ultra-nationalist movement championing “traditional values” under the banner of “Georgia for Georgians.” Presented through a queer ecofeminist and queer ecology perspective, this intersectional cultural analysis shows how the discourse of veganism became associated with queerness and the small café became a harbinger of change and cultural division: a symbol of encroaching westernization and liberalization. Examining the incident demonstrates how anti-vegan food nationalism symbolically links dietary hierarchies with heterosexist constructions of Georgian national identity within a contested geopolitical landscape.