Faculty: Research: Laurie Kain Hart
Laurie Kain Hart
My theoretical interests center on ethnicity, territorial conflict and ‘population exchange,’ migration and exile, violence, religion, gender, and space and architecture. My field area is contemporary Europe, and more specifically the Balkans and circum-Mediterranean regions. My work is concerned with social diversity and social segregation, and therefore joins the theory of space and place to that of ethnicity as well as contemporary work on the state. I have also studied religion, ethics, and gender.
My 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 (1940-1949), 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 (1944-1949) on these populations and villages.
My research in Prespa focuses on two main questions. The first concerns the effect of successive ruptures in relations between exiles, their families, and the state on the social suffering of exiles in the 2000s. The second is a close examination of the institution of the house as it functions in the production and reproduction of social identity.
The dramatic eruption of ethnic and national conflict in the former Yugoslavia at the borders of my research site prompted me to extend my work on ethnicity, conflict, territory and space to Bosnia. This culminated in the publication of my edited English edition of the Bosnian war testimonies collected by Svetlana Broz, the granddaughter of Marshal Tito. The testimonies explore individual forms of resistance to the imposition of ethnic hostilities. This book is not directed at an 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.
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 am currently engaging in preliminary field research in Marseille, France as well as in Istanbul, Turkey as I develop a new project. I am interested in how the crisis in global north-south relations is intensifying migration and affecting urban development in the Mediterranean area. Some of this work looks at gentrification and urban renewal. I also continue my investigations into displacement by probing the affective experience of exiles. Finally, 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.
Read the Haverford News Article about Laurie Hart.
