Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) and many research facilities in Leipzig had a very exciting and tense week together with Prof. Alexander Kiossev from Sofia University. Professor Kiossev gave a fascinating Keynote Lecture at GWZO (with the attandence of over 40 persons) and an intensive Master class at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) (for 12 participants from IFL, GWZO, EEGA).

The workshop was organised by Lyubomir Pozhaliev and Lela Rekhviashvili  from the team of the  project, CoMoDe – Contentious Mobilities through a Decolonial Lens, in collaboration with Corinne Geering  from GWZO, and was funded by EEGA. Prof. Kiossev’s theoretical and analytical interventions throughout various formats of the week-long Interdisciplinary Methods workshop contributes significantly to ongoing discussions within IfL, GWZO and EEGA. The workshop created space to disentangle and clarify conceptual usage and methodological-epistemological foundations of competing and complementary concepts such as post-socialist, post-colonial, colonization, decolonization, hegemony, Balkanism, nested-orientalism, and last, but not least Kiossev’s own concept of ‘self-colonizing metaphor’. Self-colonizing metaphor on the one hand serves as an example of interdisciplinary theory building and on the other hand a methodological tool.

Alexander Kiossev is a Professor of History of Modern Culture and a Director of the Cultural Centre of Sofia University. His research interests include problems of reading, the visual culture of the city, cultural history of totalitarianism and transition. He has published four monographs in Bulgarian and has edited a number of collective volumes in English, German, and Bulgarian. Many of his papers have been translated into English, German, French, Dutch, Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, and Macedonian.

A more detailed report can be found in our Open Access Library.

Members of EEGA