What has the Corbyn project meant – as a model, an inspiration, or otherwise – to you and people in the milieu(x) in which you organize? What was at stake with this project was in equal measure painfully distant and painfully close to the contexts I am immersed in, and to an extent represent. In […]
Author: Mariya Ivancheva
Mariya Ivancheva is a Lecturer in Higher Education Studies at the University of Liverpool. She has done research and published widely on the legacy and present of social(ist) movements, the casualisation and digitalisation of academic labour, and the role of universities and their communities in processes of social transformation in Latin America, Europe, and Africa. Mariya is a founding member of LeftEast, the PrecAnthro collective and is active in the Bulgarian Left-feminist group LevFem. You can follow her at @mivanche.
1. Has the government in Bulgaria country taken an official position regarding the situation in Venezuela? If yes, what is the position? In Bulgaria the Venezuelan crisis produced a somewhat unexpected cleavage between the government and the opposition. I say somewhat unexpected because Roumen Radev, the President elected from the mandate of the Bulgarian Socialist Party […]

Note from the LeftEast editors: a Bulgarian version of this text first appeared on the pages of Kultura weekly newspaper. Christina Grozeva and Peter Valchanov’s The Lesson (2014) is probably the first feature film that explains the Bulgarian winter of discontent in 2013. It tells the story of a “normal” week in the life Nadezhda (Margarita […]

This interview was taken by Ioanna Drosou from the Greek newspaper Epohi and the original version in Greek is available here. How would you comment on the result of the elections? The results of the election are no big surprise for anyone. As some political commentators, myself included, predicted already in February 2013, when Boyko Borissov […]

This article is published in collaboration with the Serbo-Croatian online web portal Bilten.Org On the 15th of September 2014, the first day of school in Bulgaria, a photograph of a third grade Bulgarian teacher, Silviya Zubeva, taken by a parent, was leaked through 9gag[i], with versions appearing later in Bulgarian, English, and German. The picture, […]

Nоte from the LeftEast editors: Тhis article has been published in collaboration with the new Balkan web-portal Bilten.org. The publication in Serbo-Croatian is to be found here. In the last days of March 2014, a Bulgarian woman, Dobrinka Krumova, aged 26, died because neither private, nor public hospitals in Dupnitsa in South Bulgaria accepted her for […]

Mariya Ivancheva interviewed Tamás Gerőcs and Tibor Meszmann about the post-colonialism film club of the Public Sociology Working Group ‘Helyzet’ on 18 February 2014, in Budapest. We are now at the Gólya Community Centre in Budapest. I would start with a question about how these three things, namely the Gólya (Stork) centre, the Helyzet (Position […]

Over the last few days Bulgaria has witnessed opposing waves of mobilization that divide the country across ethnic and class lines. Since the 23rd of October, a student strike and sustained occupation has spread across six universities in the capital and other cities. The strike is the latest in a series of protests in the […]

Just few months after the Bulgarians overturned the government of Boyko Borissov in February 2013, they are back in the streets in tens of thousands demanding the resignation of the new government. While this might look like the same wave of protests, there has been little continuity. The protests in February were an outburst of […]
On Wednesday, 20th of February 2013, the Bulgarian government headed by Boyko Borissov has deposited its resignation. What happened? What comes next? Over the last week, Bulgarians in most big cities have been out in the streets, protesting against the increased electricity and heating bills. While the increase has happened gradually throughout 2012, the bills that […]