Ana Kirvalidze is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Ilia State University, where she also received her PhD in sociology. After Ph.D. studies at University of Fribourg (UF) she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin (HU), specialized on research methods at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) methods schools, and studied at the Arizona State University program in Advanced Social Science Research (ASU). Her research interests include post-Soviet transformations, particularly its socio-cultural consequences. She has published on the formation process of collective memory and identity in contemporary Georgia in Nationalities Papers, The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, and Identity Studies. She is a member of the Association of the Study of Nationalities and the European Sociological Association (ESA). After several research projects examining issues of regional identity formation in the South Caucasus region, she led a research project “Passing or Failing the Stalin Test? Analyzing Contemporary Perceptions of Stalin in Georgia”, which was funded by Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN). Together with project members she co-authored a book “Stalin Today: Contending with the Soviet Past in Georgia” (2016). During this project she worked on issues of national identity and collective memory among ethnic minority groups from Marneuli and Akhaltsikhe, prepared methodological instruments for focus groups, in-depth interviews and organized the respective fieldwork in the ethnic minority urban and rural areas. For the last two years she conducted focus groups and in-depth interviews with ethnic minority (Azeris and Armenians) and majority students at Ilia State University on issues of multicultural attitudes, regional and national identities, and social involvement. All this relevant expertise and the results gained from her qualitative and quantitative research was helpful in the preparation for his current project at university of Oxford: “Measuring Social Cohesion in Georgia: Senses of Belonging and Connectedness in Multicultural and Multiethnic Georgian Society”.