Our alumna Roberta Koleva has recently published an article in the Journal for Sociocultural Anthropology's special issue, "Anthropologies of Post-socialism / Post-socialist Anthropologies: On the Battlefield of Narratives and Imaginaries".

"Anthropologies of Post-socialism / Post-socialist Anthropologies: On the Battlefield of Narratives and Imaginaries".

The article, derived from her MA thesis, delves into social imaginaries of “Europeanness,” “democracy,” and “transition” through the discourses surrounding the dismantling of the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia. Following different groups of people engaged in the debates surrounding the memorial, she explored how the "void" of the half-dismantled pedestal became a stage for various (geo)political negotiations and reimagined visions of the past, present, and future, especially amid the war in Ukraine. Despite the declaration that “there is nothing to ‘transit’ anymore”, 35 years after 1989 the monument came to be seen as the “Bulgarian Berlin Wall” – an imaginary wall, an obstacle to the post-socialist transition, the destruction of which would open the way for the European unification and the desired “normality”. Engaging with contemporary debates in social theory about the relevance of “post-socialism” as an analytical framework, her article introduces the concept of “standby transition” to describe this frustrating feeling of feeling “stuck” in an incomplete transition, paired with an ongoing anticipation of a "better" future often linked to the imagined "West" and the state of being truly “European”.