Bjarge Schwenke Fors

Ph.D. Candidate in Border Studies

Education:

I have received undergraduate training in Comparative Politics, Social Anthropology, Russian and Turkish language at the University of Bergen, the University of Tromsø and Ankara University TÖMER (Istanbul branch). I submitted my cand.polit. dissertation in Social Anthropology to the University of Tromsø in 2006.        

Research:

My academic interests cover the anthropology of borders, space and identity, nationalism and geopolitics. Regions of particular interest are the Caucasus and the Barents region.  

My cand.polit. thesis was based on field research in Ajaria, an autonomous region of Georgia on the border with Turkey. Here I investigated how old and new political and symbolic borders in the region interacted, were reconstructed and expressed in everyday life as well as on a macro level.  

Since 2008 I have been engaged in a three year collaborative and cross-disciplinary research program, The Construction and Negotiation of Borders: Discourses related to the border between Norway and Russia, at Finnmark University College and the Barents Institute: http://www.barentsinstitute.org/the-construction-and-negotiation-of-borders.530335-40865.html The program is financed by the Research Council of Norway. My Ph.D. project, bearing the working title Spatial Identity in the Russian-Norwegian Borderland, will form part of this program. The project will, from an anthropological point of view, focus on the current construction and negotiation of national, regional and local identities on both sides of the Russian-Norwegian border.  

Publications:

Fors, Bjarge Schwenke (2009) Fysisk åpning - symbolsk lukking: Den tyrkisk-georgiske grenseregionen som case. Paper presented at the conference ”Unmaking Borders” organized by the Barents Institute, Finnmark University College and Sør-Varanger municipality, Kirkenes, January 29, 2009. 

Fors, Bjarge Schwenke (2008) The Prospects for the Development of a Barents Identity Region. Paper presented at the Scientific Excursion “Encountering the Changing Barents” organized by the Barents Arctic Network of Graduate Schools (BANG), Lovozero, August 14, 2008. To be published.  

Fors, Bjarge Schwenke (2006) Territorialisering og grenser: Nasjonal og religiøs tilhørighet i Den autonome republikken Adsjaria [Territorialization and Borders: National and Religious Belonging in the Autonomous Republic of Ajaria]. Tromsø: University of Tromsø.

Fors, Bjarge Schwenke (2005) Nation, Religion and Generation in Ajaria, Georgia. Paper presented at the 5th Nordic Conference on the Anthropology of Postsocialism “Uncertainty and Freedom: Second- Generation Change in the Postsocialist World” organized by Nordic and Central/East European Network for Qualitative Research (NECEN), Oslo, April 22-24, 2005.