CRRC’s third annual Methodological Conference: Transformations in the South Caucasus and its Neighbourhood

The third annual CRRC methodological conference took place on June 26 and 27 at Rooms Hotel, Tbilisi. With over 50 participants and a packed program of presentations, workshops, and speeches the conference drew together policy practitioners and researchers from the South Caucasus and beyond.

Rory Fitzgerald, Director of the European Social Survey and Senior Research Fellow at City University London, delivered an engaging workshop on the challenges of cross-national surveys using the example of the European Social Survey (ESS).

Mihaylo Milovanovitch, Network Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, gave a memorable presentation on a method for measuring ethics in the Armenian education system. The research linked corruption with educational outcomes in Armenia.

Alexi Gugushvili, an Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN) Research Fellow in South Caucasus Studies at the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre of the St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, delivered the final keynote speech, Money Can’t Buy Me Love: Foreign Land Ownership Regime and Attitudes in Georgia.  In the speech, Alexi argued that the land ownership debates of recent years in Georgia arise from “the confluence of factors such as the communist legacy, historical memory, rural nationalism, agricultural underdevelopment and inequality”.

For more information, the full program and some of the papers presented at the conference can be accessed here.