Svetlana Dimitrova, Ph.D.

Junior Visiting Fellow - Summer Semester 2022

Svetlana Dimitrova is a junior visiting research fellow in the field of excellence in the summer semester 2022. Her project “Academic citizenships, political citizenships. A new Republic of critical social sciences from ‘East’?” examines the constellation of “committed” groups of young researchers that has emerged in or between different “Eastern” countries. The work aims to explore the dynamics producing the contours of a new critic generation and the re-actualization of the socialist legacy. 

"It is especially in the political tensions that the social sciences are going through - part of the dynamic of transformation of the academic space - that we should seek the explanation of the socialization of this new generation. The identification of such processes has important epistemological and political dimensions."

Svetlana Dimitrova was trained in Bulgaria and France and holds a PhD in Social Sciences-Sociology from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris. She currently teaches social sciences at the Institute of Social Work (IRTS) of the University of Paris North. Svetlana Dimitrova is interested in the relationships between histories, sociologies and geographies of knowledge. Her recent publications focus on the understanding of the “post-socialist” period in the light of the socio-historical transformations during the Cold War. Other recent projects dealt with issues such as “African students formed in the countries of the ex-Eastern Bloc. Stories, biographies, experiences” and “Narratives and imagination of women involved in transnational IVF pathways”.