Christine Byrd for the UC Irvine School of Social Sciences
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, UC Irvine graduate student Gvantsa Gasviani was surprised at how the conflict reshaped her home country of Georgia. On one visit, she noticed anti-Russian graffiti on nearly every street, amid a surge of Russian exiles moving in.
“I was really curious to learn about these people who uprooted their lives in Russia to avoid participating in the war in Ukraine, but came to a country that was hostile to them,” Gasviani says. “I felt it was very important and needs to be talked about – especially in the West.”
Now a sixth-year graduate student in global & international studies, Gasviani has published in three peer-reviewed journals about post-Soviet Georgia, and is writing her dissertation on emigres who fled Russia after it invaded Ukraine. Thanks to grants from the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies and the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, she has twice traveled to Georgia to interview immigrants about how their lives in Russia changed after the war started, and why they fled their homeland.
Gasviani’s background makes her ideally suited for this research. Born in Georgia on the coast of the Black Sea, she spent 18 months in Moscow as a child, where she learned to speak Russian in addition to her native Georgian. She studied international relations in Georgia before earning a master’s in global studies through an English-language program that spanned universities in Denmark and Germany as well as the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was there that she first read The Global Turn by Eve Darian-Smith, UC Irvine Distinguished Professor of global & international studies and department chair, and and Philip McCarty, global & international studies associate professor teaching. Gasviani knew intuitively that she wanted to use the book’s method.
“Given the transdisciplinary nature of the field, selecting appropriate research methods in global studies can be challenging. Finding a book that engaged with these very questions, and having the opportunity to work with its authors, made my decision to pursue the Ph.D. program in global studies at UCI both clear and compelling,” Gasviani explains. “Having come from a small country, I always understood that the global impacts us locally.”
Research pivot
Gasviani joined the inaugural cohort of graduate students in the UC Irvine Department of Global & International Studies in 2020. Since officially earning department status in 2017, global & international studies has expanded to 17 faculty and 28 graduate students pursuing interdisciplinary research projects exploring social, cultural, economic, political, legal and historical contexts in locations all around the world.
Many of Gasviani’s peers in the graduate program are also international students, and their diversity strengthens the group’s supportiveness.
“The greatest thing about our cohort is that all of our research is extremely different, so you don’t feel any pressure of competition,” she explains. “We’re all studying completely different things in different parts of the world, but we can still help each other because we’re using the same framework. Everyone is very supportive.”
“Additionally, I’ve benefited from the invaluable support of my dissertation chair, Long Bui, who played a major role in helping me publish my work,” she adds. “Through his detailed feedback and constant encouragement, he guided me and made it possible for me to publish in a peer-reviewed journal as early as my second year as a Ph.D. student.”
Initially, Gasviani was researching how different generations of Georgian women coped with the legacy of Soviet control. But when she went home the summer of 2022, she was struck by openly anti-Russian sentiment in the capital city Tbilisi, and wondered what had compelled so many Russians to flee their homes. She started interviewing the recent exiles and ultimately pivoted her dissertation research to focus on this emerging issue.
Gasviani’s advisor, Long Bui, professor of global & international studies, was instrumental in helping her decide to refocus her research on the unfolding events in Eastern Europe.
“Deploying multiple methodologies and crossing various fields, Gvantsa embodies the kind of interdisciplinary research that is done in global and international studies,” says Bui. “It speaks to our department’s focus on matters of social justice and issues related to the Global South.”
Through dozens of interviews with exiles, Gasviani notes two major themes. First she noticed a gender dynamic for Russians in exile. Whether they stayed in Russia and avoided being conscripted, or left the country to avoid a war they considered unjust, their actions were considered emasculating. The war has become a tool for more harsh “gender discipline,” strictly prescribing how men and women are supposed to behave in public. At the same time, the line between public and private behavior dissolved in Russia.
“There’s been an understanding since the late Soviet era, that you could act certain ways in private as long as in public you demonstrated loyalty to the Russian government,” said Gasviani. This included homosexuality, which is effectively outlawed. “Many of the people I interviewed were queer, and they had vibrant queer lifestyles in Moscow and St. Petersburg before the war — there was even rumored to be a gay bar right across from the Kremlin.”
But after the war escalated in 2022, that changed. People started reporting their neighbors, coworkers and even family members who expressed any lack of support for the war — or even used forbidden terms like “war” to describe the invasion of Ukraine.
Gasviani also studies media and propaganda from the region, and recently published a peer-reviewed paper in The Journal of International Global Studies about how masculinity was depicted through Western media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, she argued, was celebrated in popular media as a strong man fighting to defend his country, while Putin’s masculinity was cast in a negative light. Regardless of whether it’s positive or negative masculinity, Gasviani says any propaganda that associates manliness with militarization is not going to help end the war.
Teaching & mentoring
One of Gasviani’s favorite parts of the graduate program is teaching UC Irvine’s diverse undergraduate population in courses like the introduction to global studies.
“I love big intro classes because we get to have discussion sections with students,” she says. “I like to use real-life examples, including from my own experience in post-Soviet spaces, to show how big concepts are relevant in everyday life. I think the students really like to learn about hidden parts of history — what they weren’t taught in high school.”
To strengthen her own teaching, Gasviani participated in the CSU Pre-Professor Program (PREPP), where she was paired with a mentor on the faculty at CSU Dominguez Hills and gave a lecture on the history of masculinity in the Soviet state. By bringing both academic expertise and personal experience to her subject, she aims to break through stereotypical depictions of former Soviet countries like Georgia.
Gasviani, who has benefitted from the mentorship of Bui and other faculty, has also focused on mentoring others. Through Next Gen Pathways, she gets paired with incoming graduate students and answers questions about how to navigate graduate student life at UC Irvine, whether it’s about teaching undergraduates or how to effectively communicate with your faculty.
After earning her Ph.D., Gasviani hopes to continue both her research and teaching in the U.S., a path that her advisor sees as a promising one.
“Gvantsa will have future impact as a professor who truly cares for students, especially those who are international and from countries that are often not studied enough, like her native Georgia,” says Bui. “Her teaching is one focused on student experiences outside the classroom as the impetus for one’s higher education.”
