Feed
donate Ivaylo Ditchev
is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the St. Kliment Ohridsky University in Sofia. His current research is on cities and practices of citizenship. His last book is Desire of Spaces, Spaces of Desire: Studies in Urban Anthropology, Sofia: LIK 2005. Ivaylo Ditchev regularly contributes to the German edition of Lettre International, and in Bulgaria to the daily Sega and the weekly Capital.
More at www.ivayloditchev.cult.bg.
Eurozine Articles
Territory, identity, transformation
A Baltic-Balkan comparison
Lithuania and Bulgaria: subjected to neoliberal forces of disintegration, territorial identities in the regulated zone of market democracy that is new Europe re-pattern along altered lines of conflict. Ivaylo Ditchev and Tomas Kavaliauskas share Baltic-Balkan perspectives on the present. [Hungarian version added] [more]
Democracy live
Media, politics and the tyranny of the opinion poll
The surge in "anti-politics" throughout Europe coincides with media marketization and the rise of digital technologies. How is media change connected to the loss of trust in political institutions and what happens to democracy when political decision-making relies increasingly on the opinion poll? [more]
Democracy "live"
The marketization of the media combines with digital technology to create a political order determined by public opinion, writes Ivaylo Ditchev. For political decision-making, the question whether opinion is right or wrong becomes secondary to its legitimacy as a form of feedback. [more]
Mobile citizenship?
The "new mobility" implies new freedoms as well as new privations. The biographies of Bulgarian migrants reveal how the horizon of departure has become a basic dimension of the world. Mobility, writes Ivaylo Ditchev, will need to be taken more seriously in the anthropology of citizenship. [more]
Sofia, fluid city
New social inequalities brought by the transition to a free-market economy are taking shape in the traditionally privileged Sofia. In a privatized city, affluence levels are all too easily read in the urban fabric. But appropriations at the neighbourhood level are mere irritations compared to larger incursions into the city space. [more]
Utopia of freedom or reality of submission?
Large sections of the populations of countries at the peripheries of the EU are in permanent migratory motion. The trend towards overcoming arbitrary socio-political territories has its apotheosis in the Internet's utopian horizon of absolute mobility. [more]
Crossing borders
The utopia underlying the idea that more mobility will homogenize the EU is proved wrong by the observation that increased crossing of borders creates more difference rather than less. [more]
Monoculturalism as prevailing culture
The absence of ethnic minorities from Bulgaria's public life. [more]
Focal points click for more 
Social media 
