The Protests and the Occupation – Is 2013 over

On April 6, 2015, the public debate under the title “The Protests and the Occupation: Is 2013 over?” took place at the Red House with panelists Valya Georgieva, Ruzha Smilova and Raya Raeva moderator of the event – Dimitar Vatsov, who mentioned the two events launched last November in the frames of the same project project and presented briefly the directions speakers would take. Valya Georgieva started with a strong thesis that said the protests of 2013 could be described as a step back. Because according these protests ceased to be spontaneous form of contra-democracy and turned to be subordinated to political organization. This reading of the protests was supported by an analysis of in-depth interviews collected between 2009 and 2013 which the speaker represented as the real voices of the protest. Ruzha Smilova spoke about the protests as a demand for more civil control, for more control over governance. She focused on the critiques concerning the protest in the summer of 2013 in order to address the questions stemming from those critiques: can we speak about successful and not successful protests? And does it mean that the protests which could not reach their aims are not successful? According to her the protests in the summer of 2013 were successful because they formulated the agenda of the main problems in society. Raya Raeva gave an insider look into the student occupation at the end of 2013 – the beginning of 2014. The occupation was sketched as a platform for debate, where students spoke fluently different languages of social orders and came out openly with their voices, names and faces. She showed how students turn into social actors once they learn to pre-define the relation between private and public.

You can see photos here.

In the frame of Civic Practice for Students and Teachers “Post 2011 protests” project funded by the NGO Programme in Bulgaria under theEuropean Economic Area Financial Mechanism 2009-2014www.ngogrants.bg