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Education

Ph.D., Geography, University of Colorado Boulder
M.A., International Affairs and Economic Development, The Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University
B.A., Geography and Russian Language, Middlebury College

Research Interests

I am a geographer with research interests in cultural and urban geography, critical development studies and humanitarian intervention. My work has a regional focus on post-Soviet and postsocialist worlds, including the South Caucasus and Central Asia. My PhD project sought to take a new look at how we have come to understand conflict – and respond to it – through a case study of Osh, a city in southern Kyrgyzstan that has seen several episodes of fighting between its ethnic Uzbek and ethnic Kyrgyz populations. I situate the conflicts within a deeper understanding of the processes of economic development, modernization, and deindustrialization. Doing so draws our attention to the ways that identities and concepts of the ‘other’ have been produced in ways that are explicitly and essentially spatial, such as a long-standing housing crisis and increasing segregation at the neighborhood level. I set this story alongside official (state) discourses of urban transformation and conflict, the narratives of international humanitarian and development actors about the causes of conflict, and citizen histories and memories about urban transformation. As a visiting scholar at the Center for Asian studies, I will be working on several manuscripts based in this work, as well as extending my inquiry through distance-based and online research and data collection.

Caitlin was a visiting scholar for 2019-2020.