This is a project that will help for the development of a new course at the MA program of "Interpretative Anthropology" at the Faculty of Slavic Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. The aim of the course is to initiate reflection in the MA students on Bulgarian culture of the 19th c. from the perspective of history of emotions. It will be an obligatory course, held in Bulgarian every fall semester of the academic year, starting from 2017/2018. Its design and goals are in accordance with the conceptual framework of the whole MA program to provide multidisciplinary methodological keys for interpretation of anthropological phenomena.
This project engages the cold war order of the 1970s through the experiences of a small state, Bulgaria, on the global cultural scene. Using cultural exchange as a lens, I detail Bulgarian policies at home and abroad to explore the importance of cultural diplomacy during a period of profound worldwide reorganization. By studying the unlikely encounters that emerged through culture, I show that the complex transformation of the cold war order in 1970s was not only the result of superpower dynamics. As contacts between East and West increased and the developing countries gained prominence, new opportunities arose for small states to interact globally and influence world affairs. Culture provided one successful strategy for shaping the global order through active engagement with a range of actors in the First, Second, and Third Worlds. In an unexpected twist, cold war cultural exchange became an aspect of contemporary cultural globalization.
The project proposes to develop an educational board game for teaching higher order thinking skills (critical, metacognitive and creative thinking) and social skills (effective communication, confidence, leadership, teamwork) through the close reading of literary texts. The game will not be limited to one particular literary work, genre or approach – it will provide an expandable toolkit of analytical instruments, applicable to any literary text. Moreover, the game will not be limited to one particular level of instruction – the target audience of the project are university students, but it will also be possible to use with secondary school students and people outside the educational system.
The project is based on two major premises. First, traditional passive, content-based, teacher-dominated, individualistic forms of learning need to be counterbalanced by active, inquiry-based, student-centred, collaborative forms of learning. Second, the sense of freedom and enjoyment associated with play and games holds an enormous potential for enhancing learning and student engagement, which remains unused in higher levels of education.
Within the framework of the project the game will be created, tested in the classroom, its pedagogical effects will be measured and discussed in a research publication, and a model for assessing student participation will be proposed.
Against the background of the already long crisis of both the welfare state and neoliberalism, the social has been proclaimed as either dead, or as undergoing some kind of renaissance through social economy, civil society projects, and community (re)building and development. I propose, in this course, as a way of creating a meaningful "history of the present", a history of the social, focused on Central and Eastern Europe, but part of a larger European comparative and transnational approach. The social I plan to explore is not an essence, present whenever individuals gather and miraculously subsisting in their absence, but a project, instituted in various ways, with different tonalities, shapes, and histories.
In Central and Eastern Europe, a number of inter-mingled modern entities – nation, state, science, and the “social” – emerged, in new configurations, at the end of the nineteenth century. These modern looking beings travelled through various transnational networks: as discourses; political, financial, and scientific elites; diplomas and certificates; technologies, practices, habits, and fashions. All these fragments were reassembled in local contexts by elites anxious to solve their local problems but also to retain enough resemblance with how these entities were deemed to look in their original places of origin.
Leading – the largest, most profitable, innovative, and sustainable – companies, that is big business, have been in the focus of business history since the emergence of the field. However, concerning the industrial period, these studies have been based on data mostly from North America and Western Europe. My previous research demonstrated that the largest firms in the pre-World War I Russian Empire were large also by international standards, compared to the contemporary British, German, and French companies. Consequently, our understanding of global big business, its development and operation is distorted by the limited geographical scope of the data. In my proposed project, I intend to create a basis for a more comprehensive analysis of global big business before WWI by combining the already existing data from all over the world and including the largest Eastern European and Russian firms as well. The outcome will be an open-access dataset and an on-line interactive map of the world’s leading companies before WWI, as well as a research paper analyzing how the new information from Eastern Europe changes the global picture of big business. The online database and map are effective means to communicate the findings towards the international scholarship of the emergence of modern business enterprise. By this, the project aims to contribute to the integration of Eastern Europe into the study of a global history of business leadership and excellence in the past andpresent. Based on the research, I will prepare teaching materials for the course "History of Business in Eastern Europe and Russia in a Global Context."
The research project focuses on the development of public health structures in the post-Ottoman realm. I envision a book with a working title, Dutiful Nurses: War, Public Health, and Gender in Southeast Europe (1878-1941), and a series of articles. This is a new research direction for me, which compares the establishment of public health systems in Bulgaria and Serbia, and more specifically the gradual professionalization of nursing in Southeast Europe. In both cases, condensed state-led modernization borrowed wholesale from European, Russian, and American public health and sanitary practices. I focus on the attendant processes of social stratification, labor diversification, and the construction of gendered national healthcare system. I suggest that wars and militarization of the modern post-Ottoman states were the triggering factors of opening new labor and civic opportunities to women of all classes. It was in the interwar period, though, when organizations such as the American Red Cross and the Rockefeller Foundation became more involved in Eastern Europe and contributed substantially to the reorganization of healthcare services. Thus, nursing serves as a window to explore larger issues of building nation states, expanding militarization, establishing capitalist economic order, and increasing social and political divisions.
Merdjanova’s project at CAS will analyze the Kurdish women’s struggles for recognition and gender equality at the intersection of two diverse social movements in Turkey: the Kurdish national movement for equal rights, inclusive citizenship and regional autonomy, on the one hand, and the larger feminist movement, which includes women from all ethic and religious groups in the country, on the other hand. It will look in particular at the role of Kurdish female activists in the country-wide feminist struggles for peace as well as for women’s emancipation and for the legal and cultural redefinition of the category of woman itself.
Between 2006 and 2019, I recorded forty interviews with survivors from the Bulgarian gulag. I employed a methodology based on the “life-stories” model of oral history, developed by the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. This approach aims at extending the interview beyond the narrative of atrocity to a more in-depth account of each person’s experience. Thus, the project’s findings also shed light on the identity formation of survivors of violence during the communist period and the transitional years. Additionally, one of the main goals of the oral history project was to capture the experience of both men and women, and in this instance, gender played a particularly important role in how people lived through repression. What remains certain and undisputed is that for all of the interviewees, repression is a continued experience, one that outlasts the release from a camp or a prison. All of the men and women who shared their stories are invariably and forever marked by their internment. During my tenure at CAS, I will integrate the testimonies that I collected, together with other personal writings, memoirs and diaries, and video recordings of former camp and prison inmates. This project will result in my second scholarly monograph titled, Survivors Remember: Ethnography and Oral History, a history of the recorded life-stories and personal archives of Bulgarian gulag survivors.