These provided an excellent introduction to the themes of social inequality in the South Caucasus and its wider neighborhood, also giving participants an opportunity to reflect on the implications of the methodological choices that we make on the results that we generate. There was a lively discussion about how to define and work with broad topics like social exclusion and inequality, and participants showed a keen interest in how these concepts had been applied in the Arab world, North Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
During the main conference, the geographic scope was expanded further to include in-depth studies on access to higher education, water subsidies and migration push factors in Armenia, inequality in educational achievement, local government performance, and domestic violence in Georgia, access to the benefits of a more technologically connected world in Azerbaijan, visual sociology in the post-soviet space, and data collection and visualization across the South Caucasus.
The broad geographic and methodological scope of the studies, as well as the high standard of papers received made this an excellent second edition to the CRRC series of methodological conferences in the South Caucasus. For more information, the full program and papers presented at the conference can be accessed here.
