Projects
While conducting my PhD fieldwork, I encountered the category of a "new" commodity: the trash. As I was doing the half of my research at a flea-market that was not surprising. Goods originating from trash were of a structural importance to the marketplace I was studying. They were considered related both to the imaginary of the place and to the historical transformation occurring in Bulgaria. That research experiences conditioned my current research interest, which is primarily orientated towards the practical and material dimensions of waste.
In my current project, I'm interested in the way that the construction of waste as social, cultural and historic cathegory, and as individual practices and discourses of throwing away reveal contemporary social transformations. I'm interested both in the dynamics of constitution of the category (what is categorized as devalorized, as unnecessary, as unclean in a historical perspective) and in the individual garbage constitution practices.
The research object is the social transformation studied through the construction of the category as a material culture. The project is focalized on the cultural and practical construction of the category of waste through the example of domestic garbage in Bulgaria through the case of Sofia. It is primarily focused on its understanding and conceptualization as a material culture.
The central thesis is that the definition of an object as garbage could reveal current social transformations, as the phenomenon is a dynamic category in а permanent relation with production and consumption. The garbage represents a border between the acceptable and the inacceptable and I believe through its study social organization could emerge. The separation from objects would mark passages of individual lives and is related to a class identity construction and lifestyle discourses.