Deinstitutionalisation, Kutaisi, Georgia
Photographs © Onnik James Krikorian 2007.
ARTICLES ABOUT DEINSTITUTIONALISATION
SUFFER THE CHILDREN
A mother waits patiently to enroll her son at an Auxiliary Boarding School for children with learning disabilities somewhere in the heart of the Armenian capital. It doesn’t seem to matter to the staff that the twelve-year old isn’t disabled, all the school requires, the Director says, is a medical certificate.
First published 2003
CHILDREN OF THE SOUTH CAUCASUS
At just eight months of age, Tiesa and her two sisters were abandoned by a roadside. They survived by eating roadkill — frogs, in fact — and drinking water from puddles before being discovered. The children, two of them with learning disabilities, were placed in Tbilisi’s Infant House, an orphanage by any other name.
First published 2014
LATEST BLOG POSTS
Tbilisoba 2014
Although I missed much of Tbilisoba when it was held last year, I finally managed to visit it on both days this time round. Despite the weather on the second day, I enjoyed it and even managed to record a little sound.
Free Thought Azerbaijani Tea House, Tbilisi, Georgia
The BBC’s Azerbaijan Service has just published my video report on the Free Thought Tea House in Tbilisi, Georgia. The piece is in Azerbaijani, but below is a brief description in English. I’ve covered Tbilisi’s tea houses serving as a meeting space for the whole region, before but this new venture takes things to whole other level.
Developing an Effective Counter-Narrative Framework for Countering Violent Extremism
After being contacted by the US Government’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) and the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum (GCTF) to present on my work using social media to cross divides in conflict zones at an intergovernmental seminar recently in Abu Dhabi, it was a pleasure to return to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in June, this time to take part in a small expert working group convened by the International Center for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT-The Hague) and the Hedayah Center to discuss elaborating and implementing effective frameworks for countering violent extremist narratives.