Project Name:

Nation and Citizenhood

 

Type:

Research project

 

Duration:

16.12.2008 – 16.12.2011

Members:

  • associate prof. Petya Kabakchieva (project leader)
  • associate prof. Milena Iakimova
  • associate prof. Albena Hranova
  • teaching assistant Momchil Christov
  • Tzvetan Tzvetanski
  • Ekaterina Mihailova
  • Maria Benova
  • assistant prof. Alexei Kalionski
  • associate prof. Dimitar Vatsov
  • assistant prof. Vanya Serafimova

Project coordinator: Lea Vajsova

 

Topics

  • To identify the definitions of the “national” and the “civic” as practical orientations of self-experience and social action;
  • To identify the interdependences and tensions between the practically effective definitions of the “national” and the “civic”;
  • To measure the “strengths” of institutions and non-institutionalized groups in defining the “national” and the “civic,” and correlating them;
  • To map the possible points of contact between “citizenry” and “nation,” i.e., the possible ways out of the separation of discourses and hence, out of the contradiction between the idea of individual autonomy and the idea of sharedness.

Donors

This  project has receive funding from National Science Fund of Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science

Issues

What are the points of contiguity and consensus, of disruption and conflict between the ways the figures of thinking and usage of “national,” “Bulgarian,” “our” and “civic” function in an institutional setting, on the one hand, and in non-institutional civil contexts, on the other hand? That is the leading question of this research project. Conventionally, the articulation of the national is a priority of the modern state’s institutions and especially, of the school. However, the contemporary social condition – of multiculturalist policies and rhetoric, of transnational migration and mobility of people, images, and capitals, etc. – diminishes the sovereignty of the nation-states. Nevertheless, for the time being, the anticipation that it will also debase the identificatory potential of the national has rather confronted counter-evidences. Even under the deinstitutionalization of the social sphere, the “national” retains or even enhances its mobilizing obviousness, and occasionally, the “national” even evinces a critique of the “state.” That motivates our research interest – in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and social history – towards a comparative analysis of the current uses of the markers of the national and the civic within the school institution with its entire network of resources and actors, and within the non-institutionalized settings of social and subcultural groups of active civic participation.