Индивидуални проекти

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.

The project suggests a new reading of the history of the Romanov Empire’s imperialism, seeking to rethink the Russian imperial experience along the lines of the “imperial turn” in contemporary historiography. It investigates the history of the Russian imperial expansion in the western part of the North Caucasus from the final decade of the eighteenth century to the 1870s. The project argues that the Tsarist behavior in this borderland shared many commonalities with colonial practices of the overseas empires, from Orientalism to genocide. This territory was a place of entangled cross-cultural encounters in a colonial setting: Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking Cossack colonists, indigenous Adyghe people, career Russian militaries, and, after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, hundreds of thousands of peasants from central provinces. These groups found themselves in a new and unusual situation, meeting each other face-to-face for the first time. As a result, their sense of belonging and their relationship to the empire was constantly re-negotiated, while the roles of “dominant” and “subordinate,” “hegemony” and “subalternity,” colonials and colonized repeatedly turned upside down. Focusing on the Ukrainian-speaking Cossacks, Dr. Polianichev studies how the colonial communities adjusted to and made use of imperialism as well as what hierarchies of loyalties they produced.

Тhis research, drawing one a semi-ethnographic study, will examine the consequential post-independence shifts in penal policies and prison practices in Ukraine and their effects, often unintentional, on the inner prison world.