Faculty: Research: Laurie Kain Hart
Laurie Kain Hart
My interests center on ethnicity, territorial conflict and ‘population exchange;’ migration and exile; violence and psycho-social distress; religion; gender; and space and architecture. My work is primarily concerned with pluralism and social segregation in the contemporary circum-Mediterranean region (especially the eastern Mediterranean) and the Balkans and the urban United States.
My ethnographic research has focused on nation-state borders and on the displacements caused by ethno-political conflict. Since the mid 1990s I have been documenting the politics of ethnicity, space and nation-building in a regional network of villages surrounding Lake Prespa in northwest Greek Macedonia. Located at the intersection of three nation states (Albania, ex-Yugoslav Macedonia, and Greece) this network of a dozen villages has been the site of a century of radical change and conflict due to state-sponsored population exchanges (1923), protracted civil war (1944-1949), cold war hostilities (1949-1980s), internal state resettlement projects (1950s), border disputes (1990s), and labor migration (1990s-present). This research examines the long-term consequences of the Greek Civil War on these populations and villages and focuses on two main questions: first, the effect of successive ruptures in relations between exiles and their families and the state on the social suffering of former political exiles in the 2000s; and second, how institution of the house functions in the production and reproduction of social identity.
With the eruption of war in the former Yugoslavia I initiated research on ethnicity, conflict, territory and space in Bosnia and collaborated with physician Svetlana Broz, granddaughter of Marshal Tito, to edit and produce an English edition of the Bosnian war testimonies she collected during the conflict (Good People in an Evil Time, Other Press 2004). The testimonies explore individual forms of resistance to the imposition of ethnic hostilities. This book is not primarily directed towards and academic audience, but is intended to open the discussion of conflict and civic courage to a broad constituency concerned with the direction of civil society and the state in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. I also collaborated with a former BMC/HC student, Aida Premilovac, on a study of the appropriation of private houses and public space in Stolac, BH during and after the conflict (“Reconstruction, Pluralism and Syncretism in Post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina”).
My first book, Time, Religion, and Social Experience in Rural Greece (Rowman and Littlefield Pubs. 1992), is an ethnography of local religious practice in the southern Peloponnese in Greece. The book analyzes the connections between secular social life and religious (Greek Orthodox) ethics and rationalities, and explores the local experience of historical and ritual time. I argue that in village practice social and religious ethics are not radically opposed but are instead two interrelated sources of ethical reflection generated by particular conflicts in gender and kinship relations as well as socioeconomic change. Informed by my previous career and education as an architect, I explore the production of a social landscape as it serves to materialize particular senses of time and value.
I have carried out preliminary field research in Marseille, France as well as in Istanbul, Turkey focusing on migration and the crisis in global north-south relations and on gentrification, urban renewal, and social distress. I am exploring how southern European countries have emerged as the transit points between the global “south” and “north” in the hazardous terrain of labor migration.
In 2009-2010 I completed a collaborative community video in Coatesville, PA on the history of (formerly segregated) Hayti, an African-American neighborhood centered on the Passtown Baptist Church, and am currently engaged in research on the health and social impacts of housing infrastructure, segregation, migration and poverty in North Philadelphia.