Individual projects
The research is focused on the central issue how the new information and communication technologies transform the political process in Bulgaria. There are three main zones of interest and they include the ways in which internet policies influence citizen participation, political representation and democracy.
These fields build the structure of the analysis and are the basis for organizing the key hypotheses: 1). Online activity ("living" online) in itself develops into real political commitment and activism with difficulty. The opportunities for mobilizing less politicized groups by using Internet remain relatively limited; 2). The danger before these activities is for them to remain above all demonstrative in character. As a whole, the changes in political publicity in the new online medium are frequently only cosmetic. Party presence in Internet often boils down only to using the new channel for the traditional needs of political marketing; 3). Internet is a field where different policies - democratic and antidemocratic - clash. That is why the opportunities of Internet to form active and democratic citizens should not be taken for granted. These opportunities should be cultivated and defended in the conditions of political, social and cultural conflicts reproduced on the Web.
The research will seek to answer some key questions as: what is the efficiency of internet politics; what is the potential of politically oriented electronic initiatives for mobilization and support; can the new media contribute to the overcoming of the weaknesses of traditional politics; what influence does internet have on elections; what are the dominating voices in the internet and how is public opinion formed online. The latest technological developments have encouraged an active debate on the opportunities offered by internet politics. This debate is global in scope, but it also has its own local peculiarities. The dynamics of the changes in the field requires an on-going process of re-theorizing basic concepts and political practices.
The project attempts to analyze sociologically the small entrepreneurship in Bulgaria in the comparative perspective of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the period 1998-2009.
Its object are the owners of micro- and small-enterprises, as well as self-employed.
The research subject is the social embeddedness of economic action of the small entrepreneurs, which is assumed to substantially differ from that of the medium-sized businesses.
Its main objectives are:
(1) To analyze the institutional, network and cultural embeddedness of economic action of the small entrepreneur and their interplay;
(2) To point out the basic similarities and differences in the modes of social embeddedness, on the basis of which to define if there is a common modus operandi of the small entrepreneurship in CEE.
The central research hypothesis is that there is no single and unified model of small entrepreneurship in CEE. Even in the same country different models, as well as typical transitions from one to another can be observed. The distinction between different models can be defined of the basis of the analysis of the interaction between institutional, network and cultural embeddedness of small enterprises.
The research will employ a micro-sociological approach within the context of the economic sociology understood as sociology of economic action.
The subject of this project is the research and identification of the chances for the establishment of a legal society in Bulgaria. In this aspect the project is a continuation of my research efforts, which commence with the monograph "Law and Modernity" and continue in "Bulgarian Legal Metamorphoses". In order to achieve the targets of the research, I will analyze the period from the 90s of the 20th century until the first decade of the 21 century - a period which is mostly referred to as "transitional", with the attempt to outline the time and social framework, which has made possible or impossible the establishment of the modern law as a supreme social regulator of the Bulgarian society. The project will use an analysis of secondary sources and interpretation of results, reached by the author in previous empirical sociological researches with a similar subject.
Bulgarian Literature in the first decade of the twentieth century is characterized by a specific “anthologization” - a result of the synchronous processes of internal canonization (the constitution of a national literature) and external canonization (the incorporation into world literature). In the post-communist period of the 1990s, prominent historical anthologies functioned in turn as a literary-historical matrix for aesthetic reorientation.
The eminent popularity in both Bulgarian modernism and postmodernism of the production of anthologies calls for comparative analysis. The research project analyzes a range of literary anthological production including such diverse forms as compilations of foreign poetry, collections of dedication poems or fictitious anthologies consisting solely of literary mystifications.
Theoretically, the project positions itself in the framework of post-colonial genre theory, which allows a shift of focus in comparative Balkan studies from the discursive surfaces of (self)stigmatization to the underlying structures of creative, subversive genre modification, represented in ideal form in the fictitious anthologies of (post)modern Bulgarian literature.
This study aims to investigate the complexities of the phenomenon of return migration in Bulgaria as experienced and narrated by return migrants from various educational, social, professional and migratory backgrounds. These will serve to question official policy discourses that approach return in the framework of protecting ethnic and cultural homogeneity in the country. The study will focus on the personal accounts of Bulgarian return migrants about the relationship between return expectations and lived integration as well as about their experiences of home and belonging.
The study will aim to avoid limiting return problematic to questions of investment of money and skills accumulated abroad. Such pro-economic approach tends to dominate present scholarship on return migration that is centered on the migration and development paradigm. Instead the study will focus on the return phenomenon per se to investigate the relationship between migratory experiences of returnees and their civic, cultural and ethnic self-identifications. Explored will be return migrants' lived and imagined experiences of home and belonging that are often assumed unitary and homogeneous by the official political discourse. In this respect the relationship between migrants' host and home country experiences will be interrogated to identify modes of continuity or discontinuity and their relationship to migrants' sense of belonging and experiences of home. In particular the study will focus on the subjective perceptions and objective experiences of home as migrants' lived and imagined reality and their bearing on migrants return and consequent adaptation. The study will aim to shed light on the complexities if return migrants identities that are anchored socially and culturally in multiple places of past and present being.
Methods: The study will involve in-depth interviews with return migrants, semi-structured interviews with officials from relevant migration management institutions and discursive analysis of governmental strategy papers, action plans and official reports in the area of migration and return.
There is a striking consensus in the literature on South-Eastern Europe. It is commonly agreed that the region missed the first wave of globalization, which brought growth and prosperity to most of the world at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The Balkans, as this most backward European periphery is also called, failed to make, it is insisted, any significant progress in its social and economic modernization prior WW-II. What I see as the main problem of the current literature on the South-East Europe is its static and sketchy character. Its unspoken corollary is that modernization (not more that partial and phlegmatic indeed) could be achieved only within the frames of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes.
The aim of the proposed research is to cast new light on the moving internal borders of modernisation in the Bulgarian village. On the basis of a unique archival collection of 588 peasant account books, discovered by chance in the National Archive, it proposes an in-depth interdisciplinary investigation of the microeconomics of peasant farming in one of the most densely populated regions of peasant Europe, less than a decade before it was swept up in the maelstrom of collectivization and forced modernization. Peasant account books provide an extraordinarily detailed glimpse into the day to day activities of small peasant farmers in Bulgaria between 1935 and 1945. ‘Measuring' the growth potential of rural Bulgarian we may then speculate on the existing prospects of modernisation avoiding the extremes of the forced collectivisation.
In my project I intend to focus on intellectual networks activating across the Iron Curtain in order to contribute to the reconstruction of the dynamic of Cold War cultural exchanges and to challenge the conceptual assumptions underpinning the anti-communist taxonomies.
My aim is not just to contrast networks of data gathering with the taxonomical processing of the data, but also to analyze the very process of inferring dichotomies and separating the truth from lies as an inter-discursive confrontational practice unfolding along (and not in spite of) informal trade-offs and ideological trespassing. I attempt therefore to enhance a meta-critical approach to the classifying and documenting of “resistances” as well as of “truthful” behaviors under Communism by investigating the practice of “observing”, “monitoring” and “commenting” on “deviances” by external and internal critical agencies during the Cold War (such as Radio Free Europe and the Security Police). The analysis of transnational cultural agents acting as informative collaborators will be confronted with the critical reading of the bureaucratic archival data belonging to the agencies feeding upon their very mobility. System theory and historical epistemology will provide the tools for the understanding of the paradoxical dynamic of the reproduction of classificatory schemes through the systemic and systematic trespassing of cultural, ethical and political borders within an information poor environment.
For the study of Ottoman society, the urban economic and social system and the activities of its main components (raya and askeri), are of prime importance. The level of urbanization in the 18th-century Ottoman Empire and the economic state of the urban population however seem to be almost entirely neglected topics in present-day research. The so-called classical period (15th - 17th c.c.) is much better studied from different points of views - administrative, economic, demographical, fiscal, etc. This is almost equally true about the Tanzimat period, partly due to the availability of numerous historical sources.
Because of the importance and interest in these two periods, stemming, among others, from political considerations, the immediate pre-Tanzimat era has been altogether neglected. As a result, little is known about the size of the population, the social and economic differentiation, the social and professional activities of the citizens, as well as the changes in these activities, the level of prices and the cost of living in the 18th-century Ottoman Empire.
The proposed project will focus on these issues through case-studies of the towns of Sofia, Ruschuk and Vidin which happened to play a significant role in Ottoman political and economic history. The case-studies of the social and economic history of these cities will contribute to delineate the economic model of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century.
Moreover, Ruschuk, Vidin and Sofia are interesting cases because of their significant role in the Ottoman political history in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Two of the cities (Vidin and Ruschuk) were governed by influential ayans like Ismail Trusteniklioglu, Bayraktar Mustafa Pasha and Osman Pazvantolu. On the other hand, Sofia was a strict supporter of the central authority in Istanbul throughout the 18th century. The city was the home of the Sultan's forces, which were summoned against Osman Pazvantoglu at the end of 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries.
The project's first goal is to examine the demographic potential of the cities, the ethnic, religious and professional composition of their population (i.e., Muslims and Christians, soldiers and artisans, etc.).
The second and main aim is to build up the professional and ownership profile of the population and to create a "portrait of property" for different social groups - the askeri (the Ottoman ruling class), the reaya (the tax-payers), the artisans, the women. I will also try to elucidate their role and importance in the city's economic and social life, their activities in agriculture and involvement in crafts respectively.