Street names as one of the elements in complex and dynamic urban systems could be considered to be much more than just instruments for practical spatial orientation within the city. The particular focus of the project will be on analysing the changing landscape of historical figures or events in Sofia’s street name signs. Street names are part of the symbolic culture and as such play a certain role in symbolic politics. They can be regarded as a strictly official and an influential channel through which authorities transmit ideas, including their vision of the past. The project will thus seek to examine the place of street naming as a part of symbolic politics and to evaluate the specific roles in the process of different elites. The project will be mainly based on archival research analysing various official documents, including city-council proceedings. The long period to be covered is aimed at reconstructing various layers of changing national values and presenting in a meaningful way changing paradigms in Bulgarian society throughout its modern history.
The project aims at writing a book entitled “Constitutional Semiotics. Theory of Imaginative, Visual and Emotional Discourses in Constitutional Law”. The book will be published with “Hart” publishing, Oxford, UK. The book proposal has underwent two blind peer reviews which were very positive and have led to the conclusion of a publishing agreement.
Main assumption of the project and the book is that the constitution is not merely legal act but is also intellectual product and cultural artefact. The constitution contains normative ideologies and ideas, mythologies, codes and geometric imaginative and ordering forms which stem out of collective constitutional imagination and are result of durable and long-lasting process of evolving constitutional civilization. Consequently, constitutional theory must necessarily address also the performance of the constitution as product of collective imagination and as codification of collective imaginaries.
The project and the book focus on the imaginative and visual discourse of constitutionalism which is built upon such collective constitutional imaginaries and on the peculiar normativity of constitutional geometry and constitutional mythology as borderline phenomena entrenched in both rational and emotional constitutionalism. The book shall demonstrate that the constitution contains symbolic codes. In parallel to its institutional and normative structure it is shaped also through the forms of constitutional geometry. Moreover, the constitution is the legal framework and the ultimate source of collective mythologies, some of which possess visual aspect and may be imagined, ordered and analyzed through the lenses of constitutional geometry. All these findings, related to the imaginative and visual discourse of constitutional law, trigger legitimate recourse to semiotic approach to constitutionalism which is the main object of study of the research project and the book I am proposing.
The goal of the current project is to analyze the procedures related to the construction of communist ‘heritage’ in Eastern Europe, from the perspectives of the public debates surrounding its interpretation and valorization, and in the context of recent trends of teaching twentieth-century history in the European Union. Taking as a launching point the double-bound meanings of heritage as ‘legacy’ and ‘patrimony’ (that is, as ‘something given that has inevitably been received from the past,’ or as a ‘value that has to be transmitted to the future’), the project would explore the challenges in interpreting the artifacts of the communist period as ‘heritage’ and the ways in which these challenges are met in the different countries of Eastern Europe. Methodologically, the project will seek to juxtapose the fields of heritage studies and European studies and will utilize their potential in understanding the meanings of the communist pasts in present-day European context. Adhering to a wide comparative framework with different states of East Central and Southeastern Europe, the project will analyze diverse cases related to the construction of ‘heritage’ from the communist epoch and will reflect on the involvement of such cases in teaching materials of twentieth-century European history.
The radically transformative character of World War I cannot be overstated. The scale and character of the violence unleashed in 1914 was unprecedented not only in terms of military operations, but also in the social and political sphere. Recent historiography has increasingly turned to the Eastern European dimension of the war, highlighting the topics of imperial collapse, widespread social disruption, radical population politics and de-colonization as the major consequences of the conflict. The project focuses on these processes of (geo)political, social, ethno-national, and cultural transformation in order to provide a synthetic view on the history of the East European borderlands in wartime. The main goal of this project is to apply and transfer these trends in recent historiography to the case of the Russian-Romanian borderlands, from a comparative, regional and European perspective. The methodology of the project is indebted to the fields of empire studies, comparative and entangled history, discourse analysis, and symbolic geography, coupled with an explicit emphasis on the link between modernity, mass mobilization and violence that defined the transition from the imperial to the post-imperial order. The intended outcome of this project will be a PhD-level university course, to be taught within my home university’s doctoral program.