Evelina Gambino
Contact
UCL Department of Geography
University College London
Pearson Building
Gower Street
London.
WC1E 6BT
Email: evelina.gambino.17@ucl.ac.uk
Research
My current project focuses on the development of logistics infrastructure in Georgia. Through an ethnographic analysis of the on-going infrastructural reconstruction of two key sites, I analyse the country’s logistical turn as at once a discursive and material formation. The first of my field sites is the emerging port town of Anaklia. Anaklia, situated on the Black Sea Coast, at the border with the de facto state of Abkhazia is at the centre of ambitious national and foreign investment aimed at turning this once peripheral coastal village into a trade and transport hub with a global reach. The second site, also located in a borderland, is the town of Akhalqalaki. In this town, only twenty seven kilometres from the Turkish border and mainly populated by an Armenian ethnic minority, is one of the stops of the transnational railway line Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK), a project that has been in the making since the collapse of the Soviet Union. These two very different developments are key to Georgia’s ambition to strengthen its position as an over-land transit corridor and one of the strategic hubs of the ‘New Silk Road’. By exploring the labour relations, narratives, expectations, conflicts and social relations emerging around these mega projects, I aim to provide a grounded account of logistics expansion, exposing the frictions through which it operates. My research spans across the fields of critical logistics, critical geopolitics and the anthropology and geography of infrastructure.
Primary Supervisor: Prof. Andrew Barry
Secondary Supervisor: Dr Hannah Knox (anthropology)
Background
Ph.D. Candidate, University College London
Human Geography
2017 onwards
ESRC funded
Ma in Russian and Eastern European Studies
University of Nottingham
2015-2017
ESRC funded
Ma Anthropology and Cultural Politics
Goldsmiths College, University of London
2012-2014
Ba Anthropology and Media
Goldsmiths College, University of London
2009-2012
Publications
Barry, A., Gambino, E. (2019). ‘Pipeline Geopolitics: Subaquatic Materials and the Tactical Point’, Geopolitics.
Gambino, E. (2019) “The Georgian Logistics Revolution: Questioning Seamlessness Across the New Silk Road” Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 190-206.
Gambino, E. (2019). ‘Beyond Seamlessness: the Making and Unmaking of a Logistical Territory’, Lo Squaderno. 51, 59-63.
Aslanishvili T., Gambino, E. (2018) “Remaking Anaklia: Landscapes of Trial and Error Across the New Silk Road” in Anfrage // Werkleitz Festival Catalogue 2018 HOLEN UND BRINGEN
Gambino, E., 2017. ‘The “Gran Ghetto: Migrant Labor and Militant Research in Southern Italy.’ in De Genova, N. (ed) The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering. Durham: Duke University Press.
Gambino, E., 2017. La Nuova via della Seta. Euronomade (available at http://www.euronomade.info/?p=10029).
Teaching
PGTA
2019/2020 1st Term
GEOG0084: Geo-Politics
GEOG0023: Economic Geography
Guest Lectures:
Jan 2019 – Guest Lecture Ma Program Research Architecture: “ (Re)making the Georgian New Silk Road”. Centre For Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College
Jan 2018 – Guest Lecture Ma Program Research Architecture: “The Logistics of trial and error on the Black Sea”. Centre For Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College
Sep 2017 - Guest Lecture Ma Program Policy Lab: “Participatory Research and Militant Ethnographies”. Centre for Cultural Studies,
Goldsmiths College
Other Teaching:
2017, 2018 – Guest Tutor, DS3 Ma Architecture Studio,
Master in Architecture (year 2)
Oxford Brookes