I’m David Sichinava, a human geographer with over ten years of experience in applied social research and policy analysis. Currently, I work as Research Director at CRRC-Georgia and teach part-time at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. In the past, I served as an assistant professor at the Department of Human Geography at Tbilisi State University and taught at the International School of Economics (ISET) at TSU. Additionally, I’m part of a design-research practice Collective Domain.
I’m interested in politics and urban development and things in-between. I’ve done a fair amount of work regarding elections and social movements in Georgia, housing and urban policy in the South Caucasus, and geographies of conflict and displacement. While my background is mostly in quantitative research (opinion polls, experiments, automated text analysis, GIS, and spatial analysis), I firmly believe in methodological pluralism.
Through my work at CRRC, I’ve led or participated in almost sixty policy and academic research initiatives on a wide range of topics. I’ve been involved in writing about twenty research reports and policy documents produced by the organization. At CRRC, I’ve designed and managed large-scale data collection and analysis efforts. These include public opinion polls conducted in the South Caucasus and several other Eurasian countries, collecting social media data on Georgia’s far-right groups, and administering dozens of focus group discussions and in-depth interviews.
I’ve advised local and international organizations on mapping, statistical data analysis, and research design in personal capacities. Together with my other colleagues, I’ve helped to establish Georgica, a database of academic publications about Georgia; Pollster.ge, an election polling aggregator; and Covidinfo.ge - an open-source COVID-19 data dashboard on Georgia.
You can follow me on Twitter, or ping me at david [at] sichinava.ge. My detailed resume is availabe from here