Samadzade, Sevinj

Sevinj Samadzade is a PhD Fellow at UNU-CRIS as part of the Migration and Social Policy Cluster. Affiliated to the Department of Psychology and Educational Science at Ghent University, she is examining how and when social work practices reproduce geopolitics (both its powers and discourses) and delves into providing a deeper understanding of the interaction between global and local scales in the context of social welfare provisions. Within this scope, Sevinj focuses on social services developed by Georgian civil society organisations that target women and mothers. In practice, her research aims first at mapping the field of global and local actors involved in providing these services; the existing funding streams; the discourses around gender and motherhood that are circulating; and the target groups of the services. Second, the study seeks to gain first-hand insights based on observations of and/or participation within the daily work of selected civil society organisations in Georgia. She is supervised by Ine Lietaert, Fabienne Bossuyt and Giacomo Orsini.

Sevinj holds a master’s degree in Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asian Security Studies from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She has broadly focused on gender, peace and security nexus within the South Caucasus region with a decade-long experience of working in various civil-society groups in Azerbaijan and Georgia. She has been engaged in processes related to dealing with the past and researching an alternative history and daily politics of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, in addition to implementing gender and peace education in the wider region.