Peter Kabachnik
I am an Associate Professor of Geography at the College of Staten Island.
Dr. Peter Kabachnik, Associate Professor of Geography, was hired at the College of Staten Island-CUNY in 2008 and became a part of the Graduate Center graduate faculty in Earth and Environmental Sciences in 2011. Dr. Kabachnik is a political and cultural geographer, whose interests lie in the way that people interact with places, and the interplay between place and identity more generally. He focuses on geographies of displacement, or the various ways that people are affected by, and deal with, the harsh circumstances surrounding the need to leave one’s home. He is also a member of a National Science Foundation (NSF) interdisciplinary project (led by Drs. Joanna Regulska and Beth Mitchneck) examining internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Republic of Georgia. Some of the themes that Dr. Kabachnik looks at are: how IDPs conceptualize home, by examining how they think about their former homes in Abkhazia and the way they live in their current living spaces; the geopolitical factors that shape the discourses that fuel the conflict; and how changing gender roles create a perceived challenge to dominant masculinities. His dissertation research, “The Place of the Nomad: Situating Gypsy and Traveler Mobility in Contemporary England,” completed in the Department of Geography at UCLA in 2007, also explores displacement by examining how the mobility of Gypsies and Travelers is constructed, constrained, and stigmatized. Due to a shortage of legal caravan sites, Gypsies and Travelers are being evicted from places where they try to fulfill their basic human right to home. He is also currently working on two new projects: 1) examining contemporary understandings of, and attitudes towards, Josef Stalin, to highlight the role of cultural memory and the memorialized landscape in shaping national narratives, geopolitical contestations, and people’s everyday practices; 2) the role of personality cults as a disciplinary technology of the state.
Contact
718-982-2916 · [email protected]
Academic Interests
[political geography] [cultural geography] [geopolitics] [memorialized landscapes] [cultural memory] [cult of personality] [Georgia] [Caucasus] [post-Soviet space] [Roma] [Gypsies] [Travelers] [displacement] [refugees] [IDPs] [space] [place] [mobility] [nomadism]
Positions
Education
Ph.D, Geography, University of California—Los Angeles (UCLA), 2007 M.A., Geography, Rutgers University, 2002 B.A., English, Rutgers University, 1999
Publications
[Refereed Journal Articles] Kabachnik, Peter, Grabowska, Magda, Regulska, Joanna, Mitchneck, Beth, and Mayorova, Olga V. 2013. “Traumatic Masculinities: The Gendered Geographies of Georgian IDPs from Abkhazia.” Gender, Place, and Culture. 20 (6): 773-793. Kabachnik, Peter and Ryder, Andrew. 2013. “Nomadism and the 2003 Anti-Social Behaviour Act: Constraining Gypsy and Traveller Mobilities in Britain.” Romani Studies. 23 (1): 83-106. Kabachnik, Peter. 2013. “Prison, Nuisance, or Spectacle?: The 2009 “Cell” Protests in Tbilisi, Georgia.” Geopolitics. 18 (1): 1-23. Kabachnik, Peter. 2012. “Shaping Abkhazia: Cartographic Anxieties and the Making and Remaking of the Abkhazian Geobody.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies. 14 (4): 397- 415. Kabachnik, Peter. 2012. “Nomads and Mobile Places: Disentangling Place, Space, and Mobility.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. 19 (2): 210-228. Kabachnik, Peter, Regulska, Joanna, and Mitchneck, Beth. 2012. “Displacing Blame: Georgian Internally Displaced Person Perspectives of the Georgia-Abkhazia Conflict.” Ethnopolitics. 11 (2): 123-140. Kabachnik, Peter. 2012. “Wounds That Won’t Heal: Cartographic Anxieties and the Quest for Territorial Integrity in Georgia.” Central Asian Survey. 31 (1): 45-60. Kabachnik, Peter, Regulska, Joanna, and Mitchneck, Beth. 2010. “Where and When is Home? The Double Displacement of Georgian IDPs from Abkhazia.” The Journal of Refugee Studies. 23 (3): 315-336. Kabachnik, Peter. 2010. “England or Uruguay?: The Persistence of Place and the Myth of the Placeless Gypsy.” Area. 42 (2): 198-207. Kabachnik, Peter. 2010. “Place Invaders: Constructing the Nomadic Threat in England.” Geographical Review. 100 (1): 90-108. Kabachnik, Peter. 2009. “To Choose, Fix, or Ignore Culture? The Cultural Politics of Gypsy and Traveler Mobility in England.” Social and Cultural Geography. 10 (4): 461-479. Kabachnik, Peter. 2009. “The Culture of Crime: Examining Representations of Irish Travelers in Traveller and The Riches.” Romani Studies. 19 (1): 49-64. Book Reviews and Other Publications Kabachnik, Peter, Mitchneck, Beth, and Regulska, Joanna. Forthcoming. “Return or Integration: Politicizing Displacement in Georgia.” To be published in an edited volume, Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN), Security, Democracy and Development in the Southern Caucasus and the Black Sea Region. Kabachnik, Peter. 2013. “Book Review – The Caucasus Under Soviet Rule.” Central Asian Survey. 32 (1): 102-104. Jimenez, Jeremy and Kabachnik, Peter. 2012. “The Other Iraq: Exploring Iraqi Kurdistan.” FOCUS on Geography. 55 (2): 31-40. (Refereed) Kabachnik, Peter. 2007. “Book Review – Here to Stay: The Gypsies and Travellers of Britain.” Romani Studies. 17 (2): 250-254. Kovács, Melinda and Kabachnik, Peter. 2001. “A Kvantitatív másság felfedezése: Az EU diskurzusa az 1997- esországvéleményekben .” (Hungarian translation of “Shedding Light on the Quantitative Other”). Replika. 45-46 (November): 61-88. (Reprinted) Kovács, Melinda and Kabachnik, Peter. 2001. “Shedding Light on the Quantitative Other: The EU’s Discourse in the Commission Opinions of 1997.” In József Böröcz and Melinda Kovács eds. Empire’s New Clothes. Telford: Central Europe Review. Pages 147-195. Access at: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~eu/Empire.pdf. Mitchell, James K., Kabachnik, Peter, Donovan, Robert, Noguchi, Junko and Mitchell, Tom. 2001. “Field Observations of Lower Manhattan in the Aftermath of the World Trade Center Disaster: September 30th, 2001.” Quick Response Report 139, Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Access at: www.colorado.edu/hazards/qr/qr.html.
