Individual projects
This project is grounded on the theoretical premise that ‘religion' is a specific way for dealing with social and political realities, and addressing both collective and existential anxieties. Its aim is to study the ways in which crisis, and thinking in terms of an ‘end' (of world, of time, of history), meet and influence each other in the everyday practices and beliefs of Balkan people at the turn of the 21st century.
The ravages of nationalism and national struggles, including wars, the proliferation of religiously fuelled conflicts, and more recently painful transition from ‘socialism' to democracy and market capitalism, contributed to shape the Balkan cultures as ‘cultures of pain' assorted to high expectation for salvation. My purpose is to explore the relationships between socioeconomic and political change, popular ideas of end-of-world and salvation, and some emblematic figures of eschatological beliefs.
The main purpose of this project is to explore the complex relationships between (a) radical political change and rapid socioeconomic shifts experienced in most of the Balkan countries since 1989, (b) the most popular ideas of end-of-world and salvation at the turn of the 21st century, or the millennium, and (c) traditional and new emblematic figures of eschatological beliefs.
In his Archeology of Knowledge (1969) Michel Foucault defined the positivity of discourse as that aspect of scientific practice which identifies different "oeuvres" as belonging to a single "discursive formation" and the interpositivity as the configuration of several discursive formations that is "the law of their communications". Generally, the fully developed sciences tend to stress the side of positivity at the expense of interpositivity.
Mathematics is a paradigm case of this phenomenon, because it successfully obscured the metaphysical origins of its most vexing theoretical problems. That is why I intend to explore the interactions between the epistemic frameworks of neo-Kantian philosophy and abstract mathematics in the German academic milieu around the turn of the XX century. The disclosure of these interactions is important, because the philosophical dimensions of mathematical concepts are part of what Foucault called the "unsaid", i.e. the background of the enunciative field of pure mathematics.
According to the official ideology of the socialist regime the profession of lawyers is doomed to disappear. However, this prophecy did not come true. In this project I will analyze the transformation of a liberal profession into a "state profession", using as an example the case of lawyers in socialist Bulgaria. The goal of the project is to help expand the research scope of sociology and history of professions under the conditions of soviet-type socialist regimes. The profession will be analyzed as a socio-and-historical construct rather than an objectively existing reality.
The project further aims to go beyond the state of the art and review the concept of "soviet-type professions" and to show that local specifics and inherited history play their part and lead to different types of professional, economic, and political practices.
The findings of the analysis will be compared to the results of a secondary analysis of data and literature concerning the soviet model of the lawyers' profession. The comparative study will show how the soviet model of the profession was applied in Bulgaria and will explore its local specifics.
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.
The research is focused on biographies, careers and networks of Bulgarian and American nurses as agents of biopolitics in the process of their collaboration during the establishment of the modern nursing education in Bulgaria. The main research base is the intensive correspondence between leading American and Bulgarian nurses in the 20-es - 30-es, as well as their publications. In the way of such "sisterhoods" women exchanged their experiences and reflections on their professional and personal everyday life. The main goal of this project is to contribute to the history of biopolitics in its perspective as history of women as social reformers and agents of biopolitics, as well as to the importance of their "imagined societies" and networks.
The research is focused on the biographies, careers and networks of Bulgarian and American nurses as agents of biopolitics in the process of their collaboration during the establishment of the modern nursing education in Bulgaria. The main research base is the intensive correspondence between leading American and Bulgarian nurses in the 20-es - 30-es preserved in the Nursing School Archive (in the Central State Archive Sofia) as well as their publications (articles, books, reports etc.) Another research source is the correspondence between Nursing School Heads and Bulgarian Nurses who started their practice at that time. Regular correspondence between nurses was a common practice in the first half of the 20th century. Those kind of documentation is an inseparable part of a female biography. Female correspondence was very important in women history. For nurses it was also an important tool to communicate professional information, to establish professional norms and values, to share female images and models. The main goal of this project is to contribute to the history of biopolitics in its perspective as history of women as social reformers and agents of biopolitics as well as to the importance of their "imagined societies" and networks.
This project deals with the formation and transformations of the discipline of anthropology in two South Eastern European countries, Bulgaria and Greece. My aim is to explore in a comparative perspective the institutional and conceptual history of the discipline in the wider context of the establishment of the social and human sciences in the Balkans since the mid-19th century until the present day. My argument is that a comparison between two paradigms developed in the ‘peripheries’ of the ‘Soviet’ and the ‘Western’ epistemological traditions respectively could assist in overcoming the Cold War dichotomies and in giving a new perspective to the intellectual history of the discipline. I intend to follow a double methodological approach: a) an ethnographic study of academic and research institutions and texts, and b) an oral history dealing with the accounts of the social actors that played an active role in the organization and/or proliferation of the discipline in these two countries.
Theoretical reasoning on photography must necessarily include philosophical discourse on the topic; this is particularly needful when discussing phenomena that are indeterminate and hard to define. When studying the phenomenon of photography, it is especially imperative to apply to it the basal philosophic questioning as to the essential nature, or quidditas, of a thing, precisely because it is exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to say with clarity exactly what photography is in itself: a technical means for reproducing images, a tool of knowledge, a kind of media, an art form, a manipulative strategy, or something else? The dramatic quality of this question has been particularly enhanced in the age of digitalization, when it becomes increasingly difficult to remain within the boundary of the traditional quasi-etymological definition of photography as "drawing with light".
Moreover, the comparatively meager theoretical literature of the last decades tends, as a rule, to bypass, or treat if only incidentally, this precise issue, i.e. the essence of photography. Instead, the relevant works, despite their occasionally deceptive titles (such as "Philosophy of Photography"), have focused mostly on the functioning of the photographic image in a globalized and utterly technicized social and media environment. Contrary to this, the present study sets itself an initial question - "what is it?" (ti esti), what is photography as such? (Further issues derive from this question, such as the means used and the ways of functioning of photography.) The answer is sought by tracing the common traits of a photographic image that define its uniqueness and distinguish it in principle from other representations (such as painting, cinematography, etc.). The leading assumption in undertaking this research is that the inclusion of a photographic representation in a fundamentally syncretic visual environment is justified and effective only if that image succeeds in confirming once again and preserving the specificity that marks it, i.e. if within the whirl of an endless variety of transmissions, overflows and merging, it remains just that - a photographic representation.
The initial hypothesis, around which the study is organized, can be stated thus: Although it is a comparatively new art (the "discovery" of photography was officially announced in the year 1839 by Dominique François Arago in his celebrated report to the French Academy of Sciences), photography is based on, and legitimated through, certain pre-modern (but together with this hyper-modern, transcending the boundaries of classical European modernity) worldview attitudes regarding the status and value of the world that surrounds us, the essential defining features of this world (time, space, movement, light), the regulative characteristic of truth and the acceptable limits of deviation from the truth, authorship and the role of the creator, the nature and purpose of art, the role of technical intermediaries between Man and the world, the dynamic interaction between the image and verbal narrative, the vitality of memory images, and the justifiability of "archives", etc.
The objective of the Popular Culture in Bulgaria in the Era of Communism Project is to study the institutional structures and cultural forms that encompassed and penetrated all sectors in the "deep rear" of the "cultural home front"; to give an understanding of the ideological uniformization of everyday life and the political takeover of the life-worlds of the people who happened to live during this period.
It seeks to take a comprehensive, systematic and consistent approach to the popular culture of communism in Bulgaria, focusing on research and analysis of hitherto uninvestigated phenomena, such as the following:
1. The consensual campaign for creating "a people's culture" as the nucleus of the new official Bulgarian culture which gradually became dominated by Marxism-Leninism in the second half of the 1940s. The end of the inherited bourgeois cultural particularism.
2. The new sites of public cultural exchange as the main site of manifestation of the current socialist cultural policy.
3. "Amateur art activities" (hudozhestvena samodeynost) and "the creativity of the masses". Genre and institutional structure of the system of "amateur art activities".
4. "Bulgarian Television" and the wide TV audience - permanence of programme messages and expansion of cultural audiences. Structure of television programmes in the 1960s and 1970s and their orientation towards new, "active consumers of culture".
5. Leisure time and the problem of "the cultural recreation of working people".
6. The fashion institutions of socialism and periodicals related to their activities.
7. The problem of the so-called "intonational [i.e. sound] environment". Regulations regarding sound-recording practices and music distribution in the 1960s-1980s. Statutory regulation of the video industry in the 1980s.
8. The extreme form of the efforts to take over the life-worlds of the people who happened to live under communism - the new civil rituals.
General hypothesis:
The history of popular culture under socialism is a history of the inability of the communist ideology to deal with the unpredictable and the destructive and their effects in culture provoked by its own politically implemented and forcibly conducted utopian modernization project.
In the 1420s, the Roman Catholic Church of Trakai was painted with Byzantine murals composed typically of contemporary Orthodox churches: images were placed within horizontal registers, while northern and part of western wall contained representation of the Last Judgement. Although Byzantine art was not foreign in medieval Lithuania, analysis of the Trakai paintings suggested me that this decoration was not only executed by Orthodox hands, but its iconographic programme originated in Orthodox mind.
At CAS, I will verify the working hypothesis relating the Trakai paintings with the activities of Grigorii Tsamblak (1364–1419/20) in Lithuania. I interpret them as Orthodox mission and see the paintings as visual representation of the missionary ideals. During the fellowship, I will search for formal, stylistic, and iconographic parallels for the Trakai paintings, inquire into the epigraphic patterns used in paintings across the Balkans, and consider understanding of Orthodox mission at the Veliko Turnovo School and in Tsamblak’s written heritage.
Youth subcultures (which are defined in particular by music and style) have the potential to erase, or sharpen, the distinctions between class, ethnicity, and gender. Subcultural identity in general is a collective identity, yet it consists of highly individualistic actors, who are active and creative member of their group. Therefore I will focus on ideas of personal identity after 1989. What alternative to ‘mainstream' post-socialist notions of personhood may be offered by these people? What is their vision of a ‘good life'? Such questions can fairly easily be answered with regard to the comparatively well developed Western subcultural "ways of life", where there exists a standard that is widely accepted by these youths. Concerning postsocialist standards "under Construction", it is better to envision youth searching for identity and striving to situate themselves in society even when many ideas of ‘mainstream' society are rejected by the group where the individual participates.
This research shall focus on the emergent personal identity of subculture Punk youth in Bulgaria, which is shaped by the controversy between old (before 1989) and new ideas (after 1989) of the West. The main objective of the research will be to capture the changing identity of the Punks. Fieldwork will be conducted in the urban areas of Sofia, and other big cities in Bulgaria, which are the focal points of contemporary subcultures, combined with short-term trips to UK, where a part of the examined group resides as migrant workers.