Paunova, Svetlana | Bulgaria

Svetlana Paunova is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology at Sofia University „Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria. She did his undergraduate studies at “Paisii Hilendarski” University of Plovdiv, where she graduated in Sociology. She received a Master degree in Historical Sociology of Socialism at the same university. Her research focuses on the problem how and if the infrastructures of pre-modern cities create and sustain modern urban space. The chosen case is the city of Sofia, which became capital of Bulgaria very soon after the formation of independent Bulgarian state in 1878. In the period of so called “Revival” (17th – 19th century) Sofia had developed as an administrative and military center, recognized as “city” by its inhabitants, and as a “large, muddy village” by the passing western travelers. For less than thirty five years that small semi-Islam town, with everyday life, economy and institutions, typical for the Ottoman Empire, had turned into a middle European city, with pure urban characteristics.

Project at IAS-STS: Social dimensions of the infrastructures in the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century

In the center of my research project is an analysis of the basic factors, influencing the building of the urban infrastructures in European cities and the way they were perceived in comparison with the case of Sofia. Among them were the medical discourse (connected with the ideology of the healthy living space), the culture attitudes in the Principality of Bulgaria (stressing the symbolic load of the infrastructure as a “civilization” and “Europeanism”), the politic struggles (using the urban-development as an instrument of achieving social ascendancy and electoral success), the entrepreneur activity, whose attempt was to capitalize the natural resources (water, space) and the by-products of the combined life together of a large number of people (rubbish, waste-waters and so on).

The concept of the infrastructure as a socio-technical network presupposes an analysis of the way it has been transferred from the place where it originated to a new social environment. This transfer goes through prolonged struggles of different actors with conflicting interests, whose success was dependent on the moment finance possibilities of the municipality, on the co-relation of the forces in the withstanding political parties, on the way and the rate the public interest has been constituted around the city-development. In different periods of the history of Sofia it has been achieved by stressing on such defining for the new equipment ideologems like “utility”, “progress”, “luxury”, “healthiness”, etc., which resembled very much similar narratives in Western Europe.

Selected Publications

“Komunikativni heterotopii: Etnometodologia na chat-prostranstvoto” (in translation: “Communicative Heterotopies: Ethnomethodology of the chat-space”). In: “Kritkia I humanizum” Vol. 9, №.2/2000, Sofia

“Formiraneto na bydeshtia sotsialisticheski grazjdanin. Opit vyrhu primera na DPO “Septemvriiche” (in translation: “Formation of the future socialist citizen. An attempt on the example of Dimitrov’s Pioneer Organization « Septemvriiche”). In: Sotsiologicheski problemi, №3-4/2003, Sofia

“Urban Infrastructure in Transition: What can we learn from history?” (Paper, presented on the 6th International Summer Academy on Technology Studies, Deutschlandsberg, Austria) July, 2004