Individual projects
Engaging with the multilayered discursive, conceptual and affective regimes of the European political program, I am interested in what its multiple genealogies might signify for contemporary practices of geographical, geopolitical, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary bordering and border-crossing; what acts of appropriation and criticism the Enlightenment project implicates us in; what histories of the “east” and “west” European and eurocentric values have activated; and what are the possibilities for radicalizing the Enlightenment political and epistemic legacy in current contexts of transnational citizenship. Building on theorizations of ambivalent and shifting borderings of “east” and “west”, as well as of processes of de-colonization and de-orientalization, I inquire into emerging configurations of democratic politics, freedom, citizenship, and the body politic.
My organizing research question is this: How do we reread philosophically the European political project and its critical appropriations through the prism of recent democratic uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East and ongoing struggles against neoliberal excesses in the European South? These political geographies are examined comparatively, in their ambivalently common positioning vis-à-vis the boundaries of Europe. I search the intersections of democratic claims and embodied subjectivities, as they played out in the context of those events of reclaiming public space through means of precarious (albeit exhilarated) collectivity. In this context, I focus on emerging and renewed claims of human dignity, equality, self-determination, autonomy, public space and democratic critique.
At the same time, it is still to be desired studies to appear that deal with another important question, namely the linkage between the understanding of the ‘own' Holy Land' (viewed as ‘New Israel(s)') and the geographic locations of the invaders that attacked these (New Israel(s)) polities before the Second Coming of Christ, on one hand, and the topos (of the original) ‘Holy Land', on the other; and all this seen through the prism of the real and/or imagined geography of both the ‘New Israel(s)' and the invading peoples. Who are all those invaders? Were they pagans only, labeled after the Holy Bible as "Gog and Magog"? Did the invaders always follow the archetypical direction of the coming ‘punishment' mentioned in the Bible (i.e., north), or not? Also, another question should be raised on as to the spread of this phenomenon, e.g. invading in/from the ‘Holy Land': was it typical only for the Christian polities, or was it also spread among Muslims, in Volga Bulgaria between 950s and 1230s, in particular. If so, what notions stood behind it? Was it the common heritage of Alexander the Great, an ‘ideal ruler' for both the Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages who was thought as the one who established...Volga Bulgaria? These, and other, questions will be asked in this research project.
The research project will examine international policy dilemmas in the post-conflict reconstruction of cultural heritage as a model of society and peace building in war-affected states. The study will go beyond well-known civil aspects of society building and will analyze international efforts in that field through innovative perspective: the social construction of collective identities/memories as a process initiated and launched on supra-national, rather than national level. The research will be based both on the theory of neo liberal-institutionalism and on the theory of social constructivism emphasizing the adoption of public policy functions by international actors even in traditionally ‘national' fields such as cultural and identity politics.
The research will argue that international strategies on reconstruction of cultural heritage posses the potential to create social frames in which collective memory can be rebuilt/ reshaped and therefore could prove key security factor in war-torn societies. It will demonstrate how, seeking to reverse war effects and to promote inter-ethnic reconciliation, the international community tried to change the meaning of Bosnian cultural heritage and to ‘invent' new, common, multicultural past not only for Bosnia and Herzegovina, but for the entire Balkan region.
The project will be based on the empirical examination of three case-studies:
• International policies towards (re)construction of historical sites as instruments for the invention and fixation of common past.
• International policies towards (re)construction of museum institutions as centers for preservation of the common past.
• International policies towards (re)construction of libraries/archives as centers for documentation of the common past.
By examining the political meaning of cultural heritage in collective memory building and international policies in modifying that meaning, the project will try to answer challenging theoretical and empirical questions whose validity falls far beyond the region of Southeast Europe: How does social constructivism approach in international relations interact with theories on collective identity/memory building? Can cultural/national identities be created/reshaped through externally imported policy mechanisms? What are the practical implications of the reinvention of history/past? What will be the micro and macro political role of cultural heritage in terms of potential ‘clash of civilizations'?
The project aims at understanding everyday citizenship as a social phenomenon that calls into question the classical forms of political life and that represents a social challenge both to the traditional actors of political action and to its own promoters, inasmuch as its duration and impact are not ensured by any instruments of institutionalized power. At the theoretical level the project proposes a meeting of Eastern and Western research perspectives, which are determined by and focused on specific societal, cultural, and historical contexts, and strives to transcend their boundaries. The theoretical challenge is to think the contextual practices of everyday citizenship within the general horizon of Arendt's theoretical legacy regarding the political and the public, in order not to efface but to highlight the particularities of these spheres.
The Revival process (the euphemism coined by the Bulgarian communist regime to indicate the campaign initiated in 1984 for a mandatory change of the ethnic Turks' Muslim names with Bulgarian ones) that set out in November 1984 and culminated in 1989 is an unparalleled event which occupies a unique place in the ethnic annals. This large-scale operation triggered a massive exodus in the summer of 1989 and exerted a dramatic impact on the Bulgarian society by interfering with the terminal stage of the totalitarian rule. Ultimately, it contributed in a decisive way to the collapse of the communist regime.
The economic aspects of this round of compulsory assimilation are still not thoroughly explored. Thus the basic aim of the project is to inquire into the microeconomics, microstatistics and micronarratives of the events. The research work is expected to gather new evidence and data concerning these features of the Bulgarian government's ethnic policy. The main sources to be exploited are the relevant archival collections. Other potentially insightful sources are the files of human rights activists whose organizations were established during and after the 1989 crisis.
In light of the precedents, it is likely that the story to be told will once again confirm the permeability of the boundary between good and evil and illustrate the frailness of the threshold to intolerance. This is worth to be remembered as the recent past, of the Balkans in particular, testifies that the old demons of the inter-ethnic hostilities are easily aroused from their latent state and under specific circumstances can break out anytime...
My intention to study in more detail this (perhaps, fruitful) failure is dictated by the hope that, in its blind spots, a more comprehensive perspective to contemporary discussions might be uncovered.
The project aims at reconstructing the Jewish identity formation processes in Georgia and its general context. Its first goal is to explore the identity building texts of the first third of the 20th century. From the variety of sources the project will be focused on the publicist essays and literary texts by the Jewish intellectuals. As a result of the research, the following questions have to be answered: how the Jewishness was conceived in the period under consideration; how the borders among the Jews and other nations were established and in which terms (religious, cultural or ethnic) were these borders marked; what was the attitude of the Georgian Jewry towards other Jewish communities, on the one hand, and the surrounding ethno-cultural, social and institutional context, on the other?
Another aim of the project is the contextualization of the texts in the framework of political and intellectual processes having place in the selected chronological frames. Period from the beginning of the 20th century until the end of 1930s might be presented as the three different contexts: 1) Georgia in Russian imperial context (until 1917), 2) independent Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918-1921) and 3) the Soviet Georgia till the World War II (1921-1939). In these contexts, the linear process of the formation of the Georgian Jewish narrative could be caught; its end coincided to the restriction of the cultural rights of the Jewish community and the pursuit of the Zionism and its followers. They were affected by the Great Terror of the 1930s. The renewal of the Jewish narrative could be detected only form the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The planned research on The Making and Unmaking of Political Subjectivities in Post-Socialist Poland seeks to address the highly topical issue of the ways neo-liberal discourses and practices shape political subjectivities in present-day Poland. It involves the analysis of ethnographic information collected in the course of anthropological fieldwork carried out in the city of Gdańsk, on the Baltic Sea, between 2008 and 2011 and previously funded by the Faculty Research, Scholarly Activity and Creative Achievement Fund of Grant MacEwan University.
The study will concentrate on two key stages in the development of 20th century American sociology (and their transdisciplinary inspirations and repercussions): 1) the interplay of cognitive and socio-cultural contexts of the rise and decline of systematic theoretical sociology (1940-1970) and 2) the specific socio-cultural premises for the rise of a broad and powerful tide of feminist social science during the end quarter of the 20th century (1970-2000). The methodological approach is a synthesis of historical sociology, agreeing with its designation as "enthusiastically interdisciplinary" (Adams, Clemens, Orloff 2005) and R. Friedrichs's dialectical version of sociology of sociology (Friedrichs: 1970). The project will use secondary analysis of literary sources, giving special attention to biographical and autobiographical literature on key figures of the American sociological tradition in order to capture the specific subjective meanings of the past processes, the value attitudes and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, through which science is done and the ways of doing science are changed.
This research strives to present in a rhetorical perspective the clash of the Barbarian culture and way of thinking with the classical Greco-Roman and Byzantine civilizations. I would like to investigate how the Barbarians appear not in the descriptions of the Ancient historiographers but through the prism of their own words.
Despite the ample chronological scope of the study, the accent would fall on the Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (4th - 6th century AD) as it was the time of a most intensive collision with Barbarians that determined the patterns of their image for the centuries to come.
The research hypothesis of this project is that the true demarcation line between the Empire and the Barbarians was firstly behavioral, based on a higher level of violence in the societies north of the limes and on corresponding values that supported the necessity to survive in an inimical environment, rather than political, ideological, or institutional. Barbarian rhetoric fully reflected these needs. It was rhetoric of the fighting men, boastful and sword-rattling.
The interdisciplinary approach to the problem would bring together at least four areas of study: history of rhetoric, theory of argumentation, histoire des mœurs and cultural studies.
The rhetorical analysis that I will use, was introduced in my dissertation as a standard for the evaluation of rhetorical argumentation. This analytical tool employs a distinct multi-level typology of the ethotic arguments - the main proofs that delineate an ethos.
Using rhetorical methodology also implies knowledge of the standard argumentative tactics used in common deliberative or judicial situations in Classical Antiquity. No doubt there were conventions on how to reproduce a harangue in the narrative. In many an instance there are strong reasons to believe that the authors who reproduced the speeches of the Barbarians did this as accurately as they could, although following a certain literary tradition.