Текущи програми

The project aims at studying the reception of Freudian psychoanalysis in Bulgaria in the period of 1947-1990, viewed through the optic of the psychoanalytic concepts of ‘repression’ and ‘resistance’ and the dialectic relation between them. The main hypothesis includes identifying those ‘places of repression’, existing at the level of discourse, in which the psychoanalytic ideas are stylized, refuted, denounced and rejected from the position of the official Marxist ideology taken as a framework for the sciences of mental health. Along with that, the hypothesis allows – without assuming – the existence also of ‘places of resistance’ in which the psychoanalytic ideas are integrated into an implicit or disguised form in the discourse of sciences, managing to circumvent ideological censorship. By means of an interdisciplinary methodology the project studies the modalities of relation between real repression and possible resistance both on the discursive level and on the level of the personal history and individual behaviour of certain figures who were involved in the subversive practicing of psychoanalysis in socialist Bulgaria. The final aim is not only to construct the concept of critical reception of psychoanalysis but also to reveal – in the meaning of values and philosophically – those meaning potentials of analysis that have made it become a ‘counter-discourse’ and a form of resistance against every (totalitarian) invasion on freedom and thinking.

The research project aims to explore a hitherto understudied perspective on Christian-Muslim relations in the premodern Ottoman society, namely the discourses on Balkan non-Muslims in Ottoman Muslim narrative sources produced between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It will cover a wide range of partly unpublished texts in the Ottoman Turkish and Persian languages falling according to their genre into the main categories of history, hagiography, geography, and travel accounts. By applying to the relevant accounts an interdisciplinary approach including historical, hermeneutic, text-critical, and codicological methods, the project will situate its findings within a larger sociological framework based on the concept of ‘interpretative communities’. The aim is to trace the sociopolitical implications of Muslim accounts of ‘the other’ as well as to provide a better understanding of how identities functioned and interacted in a premodern imperial setting.

This project investigates how architects responded to politically dictated demolition of architectural heritage in Sofia and Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s largest cities, in two periods: late socialism when the relics of the ‘bourgeois-monarchic era’ were still subjected to ‘socialist reconstruction’, and post-1989 transition when socialist landmarks became targets of ‘decommunization’. At the focus of my study is a dual politicization of architectural heritage: obliteration triggered by politics of history, and expert advocacy for preservation. I analyze the latter through the lens of politics of profession, i.e. as part of a coherent vision of both a harmonious city and the architect’s role in its production. My working hypothesis is that architectural heritage was a stake in architects’ quest for reclaiming expert agency before and after 1989, tackled in conjunction with larger professional themes and urban problems: issues of authorship and collegial solidarity; problems of environmental and social deterioration; questions of cultural identity and historical value. The project methodology is discourse analysis of primary sources: (1) stenographic records of discussions within architects’ organizations, specialized architectural journals and architects’ publications in mass media; (2) state decrees and programs related to urban (re)planning; (3) changing legal definitions and conservation procedures concerning material heritage and cultural monuments.

The current project proposal aims to reconsider, both theoretically and empirically, the concept of the ‘diaspora’ through investigating how it functions in the case of the present-day Crimean Tatar community in Bulgaria. A special aim of the study is to answer the question, to what extent the sense of transborder ethnic kinship with ‘other’ Tatars from abroad (mainly Romania) defines Tatar identity among locals. It is of utmost importance to outline the symbolic boundaries of these ‘diasporic’ representations reproduced by the community, e.g. investigating cases where some Tatar ethnic groups (Volga, Siberian, Astrakhan, etc.) are perceived as ‘others’, ‘alien’ and thus not included within the domain of ‘our’ ‘Crimean’ Tatars.Recent research has shown that many scholars in the field have so far failed to address the various contradictions inherent in the ‘diaspora’ concept, usually approaching the term in an objectivist, static and even essentialist manner. This situation results in considerable analytical gaps within the field of the so-called diaspora studies. Therefore, for the purpose of the project, an updated, nuanced and context-sensitive understanding of the ‘diaspora’ is strongly needed.Following some of the latest achievements in social sciences, in theoretical terms, the current project will be based on a non-objectivist, situational, cognitive understanding of concepts such as ‘identity’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘nationalism’, etc. Methodologically, the proposal will integrate a flexible interdisciplinary approach using some relevant observations from various academic fields (history, sociology, social anthropology) and will rely upon extensive desk work and field research.

The project explores international institutions that are deliberately designed not to produce any policy output. Certain multilateral agreements and permanent organizations are deprived of capacity for policy development or implementation. Examples include the UN Forum on Forests and the Copenhagen Accord. Such institutions can be an obstacle to cooperation and prevent governance by legitimizing collective inaction. Empty institutions serve two political purposes: they hide the failure of international negotiations and neutralize public calls for genuine policy. Research is based on direct participatory observation of twenty-nine rounds of international environmental negotiations between 1999 and 2015 and interviews with diplomats and policymakers. During the period of the fellowship, I will conduct interviews at ministries in Sofia and finalize a book that documents these diplomatic processes and introduces a new concept to academic scholarship on global governance.

The project looks into the challenge of decentralised enforcement in core areas of the Internal Market, like competition law, consumer law and IP law. One way of ensuring coherence of decentralised enforcement has been through different types of enforcement networks. However, while the concept of ‘network’ presumes equivalence of interconnected units, in the regulatory areas at the centre of this project, there is considerable diversity in institutional design and governance approach among the EU Member States. Through a combination of theories and methodologies the project explores the impact of institutional diversity on the effectiveness of network governance and in turn, the implications of network governance for national institutional autonomy.

Phenomenology has historically accorded a privilege to temporality. In contrast, by scrutinizing the constitutive role of existential spatiality for human existence, this project defends the equiprimordiality between temporality and spatiality. I will present an outline of a “transcendental geology” of lived space, grounded on some leading phenomenological discourses – phenomenology of affectivity and corporeity, existential psychiatry and Daseinsanalysis, as well as hermeneutic phenomenology. If Heidegger’s project in Being and Time (1927) reveals the normative and axiological character of lived space, the particular problems of bodily nature [Leiblichkeit] and embodiment are left undiscussed in his early hermeneutic phenomenology. On the other side, Richir’s and Maldiney’s phenomenological projects outline an expanded scope of existential spatiality, proceeding from the questions regarding the origin of lived space and the consequences of deviated spatialization in abnormal psychic states of human life. Thus, the aim of the following research is to perform a methodological synchronization of the above-mentioned discourses in the form of architectonics of the existential spatiality, revealing the dimensionality of lived space as pre-condition for the original openness of the human existence to the world and to the other.

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 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.