Индивидуални проекти

Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall Bulgarians are still on the crossroad between nostalgia and negation, seemingly unable to construct an overall picture of their socialist past. Importantly, we still lack a thorough study on the characteristics of social change that was accomplished by the socialist regime.Understanding the dynamics, the magnitude, and the thoroughness of the social change, which transformed Bulgarian society in the half-century after the World War II would be the prime task of this research project. Due to various reasons it would restrain from the conventional approach and instead would go along the new current in the academic literature, which applies alternative measures of standard of living like (1) real wages, (2) infant mortality, (3) life expectancy at birth, (4) daily calories intake, and (5) anthropometric data (height and weight) of children and adolescents.Given the near-complete infancy of Bulgarian research on the subject it would be naïve to pretend that it could master a full understanding of the social change. Rather, this proposal is a first stage of a larger and continuous research which has to be confined to a less ambitious scouting exercise for mapping the data scene and initial analysis of the preliminary findings.

The main aim of the project is the analysis of the development and changes of the idea of civil society during the transformation period. I want to rethink its evolution in a particular historical context and its repercussions. Specifically, I concentrate on the question about the effectiveness of the idea of civil society as the mobilizing frame, with particular emphasis on the discursively constructed boundaries between what is civic and non-civic. I am interested in how the discourse of civil society has “distributed” and relegated civic activity, how the discrepancies between the idea and reality were determined, where their causes were perceived. During the analysis I will concentrate on special features of this discourse – its binary mode (Czyżewski,2008) and pedagogical overtone (Starego, 2008) observed in Poland. In the research I will use the discursive analyse approach. Hence, the newspapers’ articles concerning civic (dis)activity, social organizations and movements will create my data corpus. It will be constructed in a way which allows observation of the discourse evolution, as well as an examination of the reminiscence of the civil society idea shape in contemporary applications. Additionally, in order to broaden the conclusions of the empirical findings, I will place them in the context of the observations and conclusions from other post-socialistic societies, asking the question about the universality of the idea of civil society and its undemocratic potential.

This paper is an attempt to explain some of the peculiarities of the present-day socio-political situation in Serbia by tracing the dynamic and interplay of its main identity narratives during the last 30 years. It represents a contribution to understanding post-socialist Serbia, through the way its identity narratives were setting the framework for key political choices and orientations. On the one hand, it will draw on the idea that (state) narratives “fix the meanings of the past and limit the opportunity for further political contestation” (Subotić 2013). This will help to analyse the persistence and re-appearances of certain narratives seemingly exhibiting the force of inertia in public discourses, and thus limiting the possibilities for major changes both in public imaginaries about the national self and in the political course of the country. On the other hand, relying on the notion that ethno-national discourse is “a moving, relational and multidimensional object” (Pavasović Trošt 2018), the analysis will provide an understanding of how, when, and with which actors (internal and external) identity narratives become more plastic and susceptible to change, indicating in the discursive space, possibilities for a change in political orientation and action.

A political resolution adopted by the Hungarian Parliament in 2020 April declared that the Fundamental Law of Hungary started a new era and terminated the so-called ’post-communist’ period of the country. This earlier period can be labelled as the era of liberal constitutionalism or that of the Rawlsian neutral state or that of ’legal classicism’. The first characteristic of this period was the primacy of the law and the judicalisation of the politics where the judicial bodies – and most importantly the Constitutional Court – played a significant role. Secondly, the mimetics of the ’good practices’ and institutional solutions of the Western legal cultures has to be mentioned. Accordingly, the main source of political legitimacy was thought to be the integration to the West while the main political enemy was an internal one: the former communist heritage was to be overcome. This process was to be done by way of modernising the legal system, based on the rule of law.After 2010, however, the era of legal classicism seems to be followed by a romantic spirit. A new paradigm has risen within the public sphere: the primacy of the politics that aims to constrain the previously dominant judicial actors in the name of popular will. Clear normative traces of the new tendency are the repeal of the former case law of the Constitutional Court and the instrumental usage of law and constitution amendments that lead to the politicization of law. Parallel to these, a strong constitutional identity-based discourse has appeared that aims to protect Hungary as a nation state within the European integration. In addition, this process is surrounded by a significant discourse on the criticism of juristocracy and elitism that seems to be a suitable narrative also for the criticism of the European integration that is in itself a legal construction of the Member States’ elites. Accordingly, European integration gained negative connotations as becoming a new external threat capable of endangering the survival of the nation and its real values, while the main source of political legitimation shifted from the Western liberal model to the revival of the nation and the idea of the historic constitution. Based on these observations, my goal is to study the main legal discourses accompanying this paradigmatic change and its evolution through the series of constitutional amendments.

This research project focuses on the emergence of spiritualized forms of psychotherapy and self-help psychologies that have become an important component of the booming industry of personal and spiritual growth in Romania and throughout Western and Eastern Europe and aims at analyzing the paradigmatic shift taking place in psychology and in psychotherapeutic practices that are employed in modeling a new form of subjectivity. By drawing on Michel Foucault's, Nikolas Rose's and Charles Taylor's work Gog's research looks at how these emergent psychotherapies are producing bio-political technologies that attempt to governmentalize both old and new capitalist societies. The research is interested in analyzing the way these new spiritual psychotherapies operate and how they generate a new subjective interiority based on self-development and self-realization and on a new understanding of personal authenticity that is becoming increasingly popular, first in Western Europe and gradually in Eastern Europe as well, through academic and professional networks, books, digital media and public lectures and the establishment of new psychological associations.

The project explores post-1989 discourses, genealogies and political-intellectual communities that undergirded the rethinking of peripherality in Romania after EU accession. Its central hypothesis is that the resilience and diversity of domestic discussions about the country’s European incomplete self and its problematic recognition within the EU fuelled an equilibrium that prevented neo-authoritarian hegemony over political and intellectual fields. I examine three interrelated trajectories for identity production: the recent past, democratisation, and Romania in Europe. I argue that the cognitive dissonances amassed along these axes during the first eighteen years after 1989 constitute the foundation for the discursive shifts since 2007. I connect such dynamics of self-representation to social mobilizations from the 2010s to point out (dis)continuities in the fusion between identity and social-political discontent. The project compares Romania’s path to countries where elites positioned themselves as the West or, later, the real Europe (Poland or Hungary), or with those that experienced similarly torturous trajectories to and within the EU (Bulgaria).

Задачата на проекта е да изследва конкуренцията и сътрудничеството между държавните и частно-търговските интереси на ключови руски и български, държавни и частни субеки като двигатели за развитието на морската инфраструктура в Черноморския регион - пристанищата Варна и Одеса. Предмет на изследване са Руската парно-плавателна и търговска компания (основана през 1856 г.) и Българското търговско коробоплаване (основано през 1893 г.). Проектът се фокусира върху периода от 1956 г. до началото на Първата световна война. Работната хипотеза е, че създаването на морската инфраструктура е хибриден проект. Резултат е от процеса на едновременната конфронтация и договаряне, представян като стратегия за всестранна изгода - както за правителствените и имперските субекти, така и за интересите на частните предприемачи и търговци. Трансферът на знание в този процес също е значим фактор. Със специфичния си подход към развитието на морската инфраструктура изследването се стреми да отличи комплексния характер на модернизационния процес, в който двете линии на влияние - "отгоре-надолу" и "отдолу-нагоре" - са преплетени в постоянно напрежение, но и сътрудничество. Проектът следва методологическата рамка на т.нар. "преплетени модерности". Предлаганият метод представлява интерпретативен анализ на официални и лични документи, свързани с посочените две компании.

Научният проект представлява новаторско изследване на социалната история на многоезичието на Балканите и по-точно се занимава с ролята и значимостта на гръцкия език от края на IX в. след появата на новата славянска писменост. Тезата на изследването - в противовес на установения научен консенсус - е, че Балканите са отчетливо многоезични. С работата си върху темата д-р Мирела Иванова иска да разкрие начините, по които многоезичието се проявява и практикува на терен. За да постигне тази задача, тя разчита на комплексен подход към ръкописните извори, епиграфските паметници от епохата, които тя възприема не само като носители на историческа информация, но и като обекти, чийто материалност е централна за формирането на тяхното значение.

The phenomenon of desertion during the 20th century conflicts still presents a very strong taboo in the Balkan historiographies. On the other hand, developments in western academia during the past 30 years made it clear that issues of military desertion and insubordination can provide valuable new perspectives. The aim of my project is to assemble and analyse the cases of desertion in the Bulgarian and Serbian army so that these cases can be treated as an analytical category. This way I will be able to reach out towards some of the most discrete processes of the front line developments in the Balkans. Two interlinked examples of Serbia and Bulgaria, the embattled neighbours, would present a significant step toward a more comprehensive understanding of everyday interactions within the two largest Balkan armies. As a result, I expect to show that the front line developments, attitudes and experiences of the men in uniform were much more complex than usually believed and that the “contract” between the state and its citizens during wartime had to be constantly renegotiated even in agrarian societies such as Serbian and Bulgarian one.

The research project is a comparative study of social mobility in the new towns, built in the 1950s and early 1960s in Bulgaria, former Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It is a cross-European investigation into how these radical urban development projects, which aimed to improve social advance opportunities, were translated into reality. The research examines the similarities and divergences between East and West on the evolution of gender roles, the tensions between generations, old and new elites, rural and urban groups.After The Second World War new towns emerged across Europe on clear grounds. From the United Kingdom to the countries of the Communist Bloc, states engaged in sweeping projects of new town construction. Driven by pressing problems of urbanisation or urge to exploit natural resources, in almost all cases they were also aiming at boosting social mobility. The social history of these urban projects across have attracted attention - more significant regarding the Eastern Bloc and growing in the West. However the history of social mobility in new towns has never been seriously compared across national borders. The absence of comparative perspectives is somewhat paradoxical, since some parallels stand out clearly from the research in the East and the West. The investigations of these parallels are the research objectives of this project, aiming to discuss comparatively the nature, the effect and the renegotiation of the paradigms for equality, which motivated the new towns’ construction. It enquires if, how and for whom did the new towns provide social mobility in Europe across four division lines, visible from the extant literature: gender social mobility; social mobility between old and new elites, urban-rural social mobility, social mobility and generations.