Индивидуални проекти

В своя проект Петер Вегеншимел проследява различните форми на местен капитализъм в Централна и Източна Европа, развили се в опитите да се управляват и развиват големи държавни предприятия след 1989 г. В контраст с обичайното схващане е, че веднага след 1989 г. следва бърз и всеобхватен процес на приватизация, рудодобивът и корабостроенето се оказват индустриални сектори, които не следват този трансформационен модел. Опитите за приватизация се провалят и държавата продължава да субсидира и контролира съществуващите компании. Д-р Вегеншимел избира да нарича този тип предприятия “икономически хетеротопии”, за да покаже, че въпреки неефективното корпоративно управление, и двата сектора, както и свързаните с тях компании, се превръщат в ключови агенти за производство на знание. Докато 90-те - период, характеризиран от подхода "проба-грешка" - са изключително трудни за предприятията, тези години все пак са и изключително поучителни за отговорните министерства и подопечните им мениджъри. Затова и в подхода си към темата изследователят възприема двата сектора като пространство за експеримент със смесен тип икономика. Макар и в днешни дни да наблюдаваме възхода на друг тип предприемачество - дирижирана икономика - Петер смята, че след 2010 г. този тип управленски и експертен опит е в основата на появата на нови форми на местен капитализъм, подобни на Плана "Моравецки" (в Полша) или Системата за национално сътрудничество (в Унгария). Стъпвайки на данни от три страни (Полша, Хърватия и Източна Германия) и два сектора (корабостроене и рудодобив), неговото изследване би искало да допринесе към исторически чувствителния анализ на появата на специфичен местен капитализъм в Централна и Източна Европа.

Based on claims to re-install a “healthy” balance between the market and the state, and to “correct” the errors of “neoliberalism” after 1989, today’s anti-liberal governments in Central and Eastern Europe are practicing new forms of state interventionism, state ownership and market regulation, f.i. in the branding of large state-owned enterprises into “national champions”. In order to place the current surge of state interventionism/state collectivism in a historical and comparative perspective, my research aims at finding evidence for the claim that the anti-liberal, often pronouncedly nationalist economic and social agendas mobilize and re-fashion elements of state interventionist/collectivist traditions of economic thought rooted in the interwar period, in socialist reform debates of the communist period, and emulations of foreign role-models.In this context, the case of Poland is particularly interesting. On the one hand, the legacy of Solidarity’s debates about horizontal collective ownership (workers’ shares) comes together with a developed and long-cultivated state interventionist “high culture” of economic theory (associated with scholars like, f.i. Oskar Lange, Ludwik Landau, Edward Lipiński, or Michal Kalecki). On the other hand, Poland has been debated as one of the paradigmatic cases for a turn towards marker-fundamentalist “blueprints” in the economic policies of the late 1980s and early 1990’s transition. My aim is to trace the niches in which state interventionist/collectivist economic ideas could persist as fragments within the alleged liberal consensus and its scripts of economic transition.This case study will attempt to identify and analyse: ideational (dis)continuities, epistemic communities, organizational infrastructures and practices, as well as the circulation and effects of economic knowledge, which re-formulated state collectivist economic ideas within conceptions and criticisms of ownership reforms and the state’s role in industrial policy in Poland since the 1980s. As a contribution to the collective effort of the economic sub-section of the LiT-project, this is meant to offer comparative perspectives to the Hungarian and post-Yugoslav cases, and help to better understand the interplay of scholarly thinking, policy-advise and local experiences of companies as part of the historical genealogy of current anti-liberal political economies.

The project is an intersectional study of poverty knowledge in Romania from the 1980s through to the EU accession. It is concerned with the withering away of class as a category of analysis for social inequality together with its moral, political, and social policy implications, and the consequent reshuffling of the social imaginary of transition to accommodate the semi-peripheral adaptation of neoliberalism in Romania. It asks how different actors - social scientists, policy makers, social activists, welfare recipients - carried out, contributed to, and resisted this process; inquires into the consequences of this epistemic change for the way in which gender and race were represented as well as marginalized in public discourse and social policy; and follows the interplay between national and international institutions, especially the state and global development agencies in which Romanian actors were involved. To these ends, I reconstruct the genealogy of poverty knowledge in late socialist Romania, its institutionalization after 1989 with a focus on the Institute for Quality of Life Research, and the use and contestation of poverty knowledge in the successive reforms of the Romanian social welfare system up to the EU accession.

The current project proposal aims to study how master concepts, related to Roma inclusion (as minority rights, antidiscimination, representation) in post-socialist Bulgaria, have been instrumentalized in exclusionary practices today. It will study the processes of racialization of the Roma in post-socialist Bulgaria and the coupling of racialized communities with poverty, which contributes to the discrediting of welfare and the stigmatization of its "undeserving" recipients.

The project concerns the Russian pacifist movement created at the end of the 19th by Tolstoyans’ (the disciples of Leo Tolstoy) in the broader context of the international pacifist movement of the 1920-1930s. Tolstoyans’ movement had a definite identity as a radical pacifist, Christian socialist and anarchist movement. The ultimate goal of the Tolstoyan pacifists was to establish a universal brotherhood of the entire humanity by means of a peaceful spiritual revolution.The aim of my project is to trace the international connections of the Russian Tolstoyans in the 1920-1930s and evaluate their intellectual and organizational contribution to the transnational activity of the European pacifist movement. The international collaboration between Russian and European pacifists became more active during the First World War and it continued after the October Revolution until the early 1930s. Tolstoyans made a great effort to create the organizational structures of international solidarity. In this field the contacts with War Resisters International, International Fellowship of Reconciliation и some other European pacifist and Christian groups was of primary importance. The result was not only the globalization of resistance to war, but also an attempt to create an alternative to the violent Bolshevik revolution in the form of an international nonviolent religious movement from below.The research is based on the recently opened records from the personal archival fond of the leader of the movement V. Chertkov (Department of Manuscripts of the Russian State Library) and Tolstoyan underground samizdat.

The aim of the present project is to investigate the birth of aesthetics as a philosophical science, founded by German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762), in light of the modern tradition of the medicine of the mind.One of the most debated challenges in recent intellectual history has been to examine the strategies through which the “medicina mentis” perspective has contributed to shaping the rise of the early modern thought. As has been pointed out, key in this process was the sharpening of the senses and the control over imagination, so as to overcome self-delusion and devise methods for attaining practical wisdom. Although the emendation of sensibility was the very core of nascent aesthetics, the link between the latter and the framework of “medicina mentis” has been hitherto ignored.The aim is therefore to recover this long-forgotten background, which will enable me both to reconsider the genesis of aesthetics as a discipline in its own right and to investigate afresh the birth of modern psychotherapy. The hypothesis I will develop is that aesthetics played a crucial role as a link between the earlier tradition of “medicina mentis” and the emergence of a cure of the soul from a psychological point of view. To this aim, the project is divided into three parts: firstly, I will reconstruct the debate about the medicine of the mind in the early German Enlightenment (especially Tschirnhaus and Thomasius); secondly, I will investigate the relevance of aesthetics for the training of sensibility as well as for the restoration of mental serenity; lastly, I will analyze the reception of aesthetics by the physicians Johann A. Unzer and Johann Ch. Bolten, among the founders of modern psychotherapy.

The research seeks to analyze the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and further transformation in the region for the change of status of Russian cultural heritage represented by an iconic poet in the Russian cultural pantheon. A symbolic personality of the highest value in the Soviet cultural canon, Pushkin became a contested icon for post-Soviet countries. This was particularly relevant for the areas in the former Soviet periphery with the developed Pushkin-related infrastructure for tourists and pilgrims. Such areas were known for Pushkin museums. The research comparatively approaches three case studies: Vilnius, Chisinau and Odessa to critically trace the dynamics of cultural disintegration in between 1991 and 2017. On the one hand, right after the collapse of the USSR, the infrastructure that promoted Pushkin as symbolic and cultural capital relevant for Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine, was in severe crisis. On the other hand, recent developments (new festivals, new monuments, new campaigns) indicate that potential of using Pushkin at the political forefront of the ‘Russian World’ shall not be underestimated.