Completed Programmes

The "Modernity and Identity" programme for independent research grants is financed by the Bulgarian Fund for Scientific Research and is intended to support young and excellent Bulgarian scholars from the field of the social sciences and the humanities with various thematic, disciplinary and methodological interests.

The “Regimes of Historicity” project has undertaken a comparative analysis of the various ideological traditions dealing with the connection between modernity and historicity, modernity and temporality, in three “small-culture” European regions: East-Central, Southeastern, and Northern Europe. It has aimed to reconstruct the ways in which different “temporalities” and time horizons produced alternative (national) representations of the past.

This two-year international interdisciplinary project aims to investigate the dynamics and especially the tendency towards deterioration of authority and social trust in the field of law in the overall context of globalisation, placing a special accent on the (European) post-totalitarian societies.

Eastern Enlargement – Western Enlargement. Cultural Encounters in the European Economy and Society DIOSCURI project focuses on current encounters in Europe to predict the convergence between the twin economic cultures of the “East” and the “West”. The research fields – entre­preneurship, governance and economic knowledge – are being explored in four East-Central European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia) and in four countries of Southeast Europe (Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Serbia/Montenegro). The selection of the fields is based on the conviction that among the producers of economic culture, businesspeople, civil servants and economists exert a vast influence on the economic performance of the Union and the social cohesion between the old and the new member states. Instead of relying on a simplistic scheme, in which the “strong Western” culture devours the “weak Eastern” one, the Consortium expects to find a great variety of lasting cultural hybrids in economic and social behaviour. Thus, in an unprecedented way, Eastern Enlargement are being studied in conjunction with its neglected counterpart, Western Enlargement.

CAS History Club is a form of scholarly interchange, a kind of “advanced seminars”, attracting local scholars from a great many institutions. The society of the History Club, the first of its kind under the CAS roof, has by now established a tradition and a momentum of its own. Its focus-group sessions provide a forum for in-depth discussions of original historical research. Since the beginning of 2006 a new section “The Ottoman Balkans, 18th-19th centuries”, was launched in the framework of the Club. It is initiated and convened mainly by doctoral students affiliated to the Institute for Balkan Studies, Sofia University and the Institute of History.

Parallel to CAS’ successful guest-lecture programme with prominent international scholars, in 2006 the Centre launched its Bulgarian guest-lecture series under the title `Academic Dialogues`. The idea behind the series that is supported by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science is to provide a presentation platform for vanguard and innovative research communities in Bulgaria working in the social sciences and humanities. Under the series CAS invites distinguished Bulgarian scholars and leaders of research groups to present the mission, the history, the activities and the research results of the group at the monthly ‘Academic Dialogues’ lecture. Besides the presentation of the academic group, the audience attracted by the series enjoys listening to a specialised lecture within the group’s area of research and representative of its methodology, and can participate in the vivid discussions concluding each event.

Multiple Institutional Cultures in Southeast Europe within the Context of European Unification The goal of this collective research project is to explore the zone of intersection, interaction and hybridization between institutional roles and collective identities. These intersections are of special importance for the countries of Southeastern Europe. The analysis of the various and specific types of their hybridization will shed light on the modalities of functioning of democratic and market oriented institutions in Southeastern Europe - a region where the import adaptation of institutional models co-exists and interacts with pre-existent identities, new identity-formations and identity-challenging processes...

The beginning of the 21st century and the contradictory process of globalization have reshaped the relationship between visual culture, art, and social life. Visualization turns out to be more and more the dominant cultural code of the late industrial society. Nowadays one witnesses a new visual wave: in the global world the culture of the public image and the "society of the spectacle" (Guy Debord) are gradually transformed by the new complex structures of the "display", "interface", "billboard", scanned-and-sent images. Along with the home video, the video clip, and the post-MTV culture, along with the expansion of design, lifestyle and fusion cultures, these new visual-informational hybrids have started saturating everyday life. This social change redefines the role of visuality in contemporary society by giving new form to public taste. As main transgressors of dominant rules and limits in the contemporary visual sphere, artists should question this situation by challenging the automated visual habits of the "average citizen". All this is especially true of the East European societies in transition because the public life and tastes in these countries also bear the marks of the communist visual environment - the burden of the totalitarian visual legacy is present in the urban surroundings, architecture, monuments and in the everyday material culture. Groups of visual bureaucrats and post-official artists are still using and misusing the old visual codes in favor of aggressive neo-nationalism and premature anti-globalism. Mass media in these countries, often populist and easily manipulated, circulate poor (and politically incorrect) imagery, split between the same outdated legacy and the newly imported and no less manipulative consumerist visuality. In this unfriendly context, the creative and innovative codes of the contemporary arts (with their specificity - mixing and transgressing systems of values, aggressive breaking of taboos, creation of new objects of desire, ironic quotations and multi-layered playfulness, etc.) are confronting a deficit of interpretation. On the other hand, given the generally poor level of the public`s visual literacy, one can say that the visual arts in these countries suffer a lack of "readability" and therefore cannot achieve a significant public impact. A further unfavorable condition is the lack of communication between the small group of internationally known visual artists in these countries and the critical minds there: one can speak metaphorically about a split between "visual" and "reflexive" elites - the academics and researchers in these countries remain isolated in their own field of closed academic debates with insufficient public impact. The links to cultural journalism in the mass media are either insufficient or non-existent, so journalism remains oriented toward the mass taste and cannot be an ally in achieving a greater public impact of advanced cultural activities. Thus, the potential of these critical elites to influence the cultural policies of the respective country, to be social critics and opinion leaders remains unrealized.