Academic interests
Religion and LGBTQ+ politics in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, with a focus on Georgia. My interest also includes Queer Religious studies, Eastern orthodox Christianity, LGBTQ+ politics in post-Soviet, the intersections between postcolonial and postsocialist critique, as well as anthropology of morality/ethics.
My Ph. D project explore the role religion play in LGBTQ politics in today’s Georgia. I am interested to explore how religion intersects in queer world-making and LGBTQ political activism. In contrast to dominant narrative in both academia and media focusing on religion as an oppressive force when it comes to sexual and gender rights, focuses my project on how LGBTQ+ people and activists themselves understand, engage with, resist and/or appropriate dominant religious spaces, beliefs, symbols, and practices. In addition is the project interested to explore how the Europeanization of LGBT rights politics influences secular/religion binary in LGBTQ+ politics. The study will draw on ethnographic fieldwork, planned in Tbilisi in 2024.
Background
I completed my master’s degree in religious studies at the University of Oslo in June 2021. The topic of my thesis was the moral self at the intersection between same-sex sexual desire and religious faith, belonging and practices in the context of religious revival and sociopolitical transformation in post-Soviet Georgia. I have a bachelor in religious and cultural studies from the University of Oslo, a complementary education in diversity studies at the Oslo Metropolitan University as well as Minority studies at the University in Copenhagen.
The last few years I have been living in Tbilisi, Georgia. Before this, I worked ten years in the Norwegian welfare and labor administration where I have both functioned as a social worker, case manager as well as a special advisor on the integration of immigrants.