In a context of recently decreasing childhood immunization coverage and low uptake of COVID-19 va... more In a context of recently decreasing childhood immunization coverage and low uptake of COVID-19 vaccines in Bulgaria, this study measures vaccine hesitancy among general practitioners (GPs) in the country, as they are central to forming patients' attitudes. In 2022, a face-to-face survey was conducted through a simple random sample from an exhaustive national database of Bulgarian GPs. This study measured attitudes on vaccine importance, safety, and effectiveness, and attitudes toward the Bulgarian immunization schedule. Information was collected on demographic and GP practice characteristics and possible predictors of vaccine confidence in order to test for associations with attitudes toward immunization. GP attitudes toward vaccines and the immunization schedule in Bulgaria were generally positive. Among 358 respondents, 351 (98%,95%CI96-99%) strongly agreed/agreed that vaccines are important, 352 (98%,95%CI96-99%) that vaccines are effective, and 341 (95%,95%CI93-97%) that vaccines are safe. 347 respondents (97%,95%CI95-98%) affirmed that "it's good that vaccines from the children's immunization schedule are mandatory", and 331 (92%,95%CI89-95%) agreed with the statement "Bulgaria's childhood immunization has my approval". Trust in information from official institutions was among the strongest predictors of vaccine confidence. Respondents' vaccine confidence levels are within the ranges reported by GPs in other European countries and above those reported within the general Bulgarian population. GPs' vaccine confidence is highly associated with trust in official institutions. It is important to maintain trust in official institutions and to support GPs in communicating vaccine knowledge with patients so that vaccine hesitancy in the general population is countered.
The communication practices of general practitioners in relation with vaccines have not been a to... more The communication practices of general practitioners in relation with vaccines have not been a topic of wide scientific interest. In this article, we outline them in the context of Bulgaria. A representative, cross-sectional, quantitative, face-to-face survey was conducted among 358 Bulgarian general practitioners in 2022 using simple random sampling. We conducted an exploratory factor analysis using questions about the role of the GPs, which measure models of communication. Based on the factor analysis, we distinguished four communication styles. They were called: active communicator, restrictive communicator, informing communicator, and strained communicator. One-way ANOVA and the T-test were carried out to explore the connections between factor scores (communication styles) and other variables. One of the most important results in the study was that the informing physician (emphasizing the choice of the parents) was the most common model in Bulgaria. This is somewhat contradictor...
staged on the urban scene. The increase of migration toward metropolitan areas combined with weak... more staged on the urban scene. The increase of migration toward metropolitan areas combined with weak public authority entails disintegration of urban social life and encapsulation of zones of social homogeneity – socially intransitive and non-transparent for the anonymous citizen; gated or ghetto communities institutionalized against rather than within the city. From this perspective the radical other of inequality appears to be fragmentation instead of equality, since fragmentation means diminishing of these spaces into which social differences become mutually visible, searching mutual recognition, constituting a correlative matrix of inequality and struggling for equality
The paper tries to push further the reflection inspired by Amy Allen's conceptual proposa... more The paper tries to push further the reflection inspired by Amy Allen's conceptual proposal that the Foucaltian notion of the care of the self may help contemporary social critique to overcome the aporia of the subject, that care of the self enables us to transcend the power relations that make us 'who we are'. To this end, the paper offers a pragmatist reading of Michel Foucault's later work on what he calls 'technologies of the self'.
Issue 10 CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDY SOFIA ADVANCED ACADEMIA PROGRAMME, 2018
Over the last two decades, the entire liberal democratic world has seen voting behaviours and th... more Over the last two decades, the entire liberal democratic world has seen voting behaviours and the rise of political actors which can be grouped in a common phenomenon: cultivation of anti-systemic/anti-establishment attitudes. The rise of these movements has been concomitant with the replacement of the deliberative forms of interpretation of collective identities and social living-together by collective myths and propaganda clichés. Thus the paper first presents the anti-liberal propaganda clichés in Bulgarian print media and news websites with the aim to find out who is scaring whom with what in Bulgaria today. The most important objective of the research, however, is to find out how those messages resonate with the diffuse attitudes, social feelings and stereotypes in Bulgaria, that is, how the propaganda effect arises. Therefore, the second part of the paper presents and analyses interview - and focus group discussion data. They are designed to generate a hypothesis about how the circulating clichés resonate with people’s attitudes, a hypothesis about what makes those clichés effective and about the interactive mechanisms that enact those clichés.Anti-liberal propaganda reworks and packages the aspirations of homegrown populism. Sociologists in Bulgaria have long since pointed out one typical effect of the sense of social injustice: the accusation of parasitism against the Roma minority, a condition that is claimed to be “inborn” and which the political elites use in order to stay in power. The homegrown populist moment here is in the notion that Roma rights are not rights but privileges imposed on “us” by the EU, privileges that deprive the rest of the population – that is, the non-Roma population thus presented as the true “us” – of rights. Here, propaganda resorts to the classical time-tested techniques of creating moral panic about a minority, adds to its image that of the refugees and migrants, and declares hate speech towards all of them to be a civic virtue. The effect of this transformation of civic resentment (the populist moment) into a virtue goes far beyond inciting the public against minorities. It above all promotes the thesis of national sovereignty as the prime European value – one which is being systematically destroyed by the EU, a conduit of American hegemonic interests. Which, exactly, is the populist resentment that is cultivated by this propaganda scheme? That we – Bulgarians – are “second-hand Europeans” and that they – Westerners – “come on all-inclusive package deals to Bulgaria on their welfare payments, while we care for their old people and clean their houses.” Judging from the reactions of the people in the interviews and the focus groups, it’s not that people in Bulgaria are afraid – yes, there is anxiety, especially among some types of people, but it hasn’t taken an objective form, a form of fearful reaction to a threat. In fact, we have a normalization of threat, and the propaganda effect is achieved less through fears than through the feeling of having been wronged, through incitement of resentments.
Paper draws on 13 semi-structured interviews with journalists from print media and information we... more Paper draws on 13 semi-structured interviews with journalists from print media and information websites to outline their perceptions of their professional world. The interviews were conducted between March and June, 2016, in the frames of the research on the anti-democratic propaganda in Bulgaria. Without exaggeration, both the analysis of media and the interviews with journalists have shown the disintegration of the field of journalism as a differentiated field in Bulgaria. What is this due to? Our interviewees explained it with the commercialization and shift in focus from winning trust to securing higher ratings – the media have come to be understood as entertainment and journalism is trying to adjust to this “commercial” requirement. But this is not the main (or at least not the sufficient) reason. The market, in turn, is changing under pressure from free online media, the reorientation of television towards new formats (of entertainment), and the subsequent fragmentation of audiences. What differentiates print media and news websites however is the drastic merge of entertainment and direct politics through omerta on certain topics and names, through advertorials that are not properly (if at all) marked as such and all this – in the lack of information who the owner of the media is. Our interviewees share a common practical dilemma: you either do journalism, or work for a media corporation. If one wants to do proper journalism, one has to withdraw from the topics of the day to the safer territories of marginal topics.
The paper tries to push further the reflection inspired by Amy Allen's conceptual proposal that t... more The paper tries to push further the reflection inspired by Amy Allen's conceptual proposal that the Foucaltian notion of the care of the self may help contemporary social critique to overcome the aporia of the subject, that care of the self enables us to transcend the power relations that make us 'who we are'. To this end, the paper offers a pragmatist reading of Michel Foucault's later work on what he calls 'technologies of the self'.
The paper traces two versions of the 'ordinary' as it functions within radical social critique an... more The paper traces two versions of the 'ordinary' as it functions within radical social critique and within pragmatistically reinterpreted critique, both of them suspending the privileged status of theorizing, though the former not yet abandoning it. Radical critique refers to the ordinary in the sense of undefined, attributeless, unarticulated suffering. Thus the ordinary turns out to be equivalent to the figure of desire that should remain erotically unarticulated if it is to be an authentic source of resistance free of power relations. Pragmatist social critique, on the other hand, diagnoses the blindness of radical critique to the critical activities of the ordinary itself but runs the risk of uncriticaally reaffirming its claims.
In a context of recently decreasing childhood immunization coverage and low uptake of COVID-19 va... more In a context of recently decreasing childhood immunization coverage and low uptake of COVID-19 vaccines in Bulgaria, this study measures vaccine hesitancy among general practitioners (GPs) in the country, as they are central to forming patients' attitudes. In 2022, a face-to-face survey was conducted through a simple random sample from an exhaustive national database of Bulgarian GPs. This study measured attitudes on vaccine importance, safety, and effectiveness, and attitudes toward the Bulgarian immunization schedule. Information was collected on demographic and GP practice characteristics and possible predictors of vaccine confidence in order to test for associations with attitudes toward immunization. GP attitudes toward vaccines and the immunization schedule in Bulgaria were generally positive. Among 358 respondents, 351 (98%,95%CI96-99%) strongly agreed/agreed that vaccines are important, 352 (98%,95%CI96-99%) that vaccines are effective, and 341 (95%,95%CI93-97%) that vaccines are safe. 347 respondents (97%,95%CI95-98%) affirmed that "it's good that vaccines from the children's immunization schedule are mandatory", and 331 (92%,95%CI89-95%) agreed with the statement "Bulgaria's childhood immunization has my approval". Trust in information from official institutions was among the strongest predictors of vaccine confidence. Respondents' vaccine confidence levels are within the ranges reported by GPs in other European countries and above those reported within the general Bulgarian population. GPs' vaccine confidence is highly associated with trust in official institutions. It is important to maintain trust in official institutions and to support GPs in communicating vaccine knowledge with patients so that vaccine hesitancy in the general population is countered.
The communication practices of general practitioners in relation with vaccines have not been a to... more The communication practices of general practitioners in relation with vaccines have not been a topic of wide scientific interest. In this article, we outline them in the context of Bulgaria. A representative, cross-sectional, quantitative, face-to-face survey was conducted among 358 Bulgarian general practitioners in 2022 using simple random sampling. We conducted an exploratory factor analysis using questions about the role of the GPs, which measure models of communication. Based on the factor analysis, we distinguished four communication styles. They were called: active communicator, restrictive communicator, informing communicator, and strained communicator. One-way ANOVA and the T-test were carried out to explore the connections between factor scores (communication styles) and other variables. One of the most important results in the study was that the informing physician (emphasizing the choice of the parents) was the most common model in Bulgaria. This is somewhat contradictor...
staged on the urban scene. The increase of migration toward metropolitan areas combined with weak... more staged on the urban scene. The increase of migration toward metropolitan areas combined with weak public authority entails disintegration of urban social life and encapsulation of zones of social homogeneity – socially intransitive and non-transparent for the anonymous citizen; gated or ghetto communities institutionalized against rather than within the city. From this perspective the radical other of inequality appears to be fragmentation instead of equality, since fragmentation means diminishing of these spaces into which social differences become mutually visible, searching mutual recognition, constituting a correlative matrix of inequality and struggling for equality
The paper tries to push further the reflection inspired by Amy Allen's conceptual proposa... more The paper tries to push further the reflection inspired by Amy Allen's conceptual proposal that the Foucaltian notion of the care of the self may help contemporary social critique to overcome the aporia of the subject, that care of the self enables us to transcend the power relations that make us 'who we are'. To this end, the paper offers a pragmatist reading of Michel Foucault's later work on what he calls 'technologies of the self'.
Issue 10 CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDY SOFIA ADVANCED ACADEMIA PROGRAMME, 2018
Over the last two decades, the entire liberal democratic world has seen voting behaviours and th... more Over the last two decades, the entire liberal democratic world has seen voting behaviours and the rise of political actors which can be grouped in a common phenomenon: cultivation of anti-systemic/anti-establishment attitudes. The rise of these movements has been concomitant with the replacement of the deliberative forms of interpretation of collective identities and social living-together by collective myths and propaganda clichés. Thus the paper first presents the anti-liberal propaganda clichés in Bulgarian print media and news websites with the aim to find out who is scaring whom with what in Bulgaria today. The most important objective of the research, however, is to find out how those messages resonate with the diffuse attitudes, social feelings and stereotypes in Bulgaria, that is, how the propaganda effect arises. Therefore, the second part of the paper presents and analyses interview - and focus group discussion data. They are designed to generate a hypothesis about how the circulating clichés resonate with people’s attitudes, a hypothesis about what makes those clichés effective and about the interactive mechanisms that enact those clichés.Anti-liberal propaganda reworks and packages the aspirations of homegrown populism. Sociologists in Bulgaria have long since pointed out one typical effect of the sense of social injustice: the accusation of parasitism against the Roma minority, a condition that is claimed to be “inborn” and which the political elites use in order to stay in power. The homegrown populist moment here is in the notion that Roma rights are not rights but privileges imposed on “us” by the EU, privileges that deprive the rest of the population – that is, the non-Roma population thus presented as the true “us” – of rights. Here, propaganda resorts to the classical time-tested techniques of creating moral panic about a minority, adds to its image that of the refugees and migrants, and declares hate speech towards all of them to be a civic virtue. The effect of this transformation of civic resentment (the populist moment) into a virtue goes far beyond inciting the public against minorities. It above all promotes the thesis of national sovereignty as the prime European value – one which is being systematically destroyed by the EU, a conduit of American hegemonic interests. Which, exactly, is the populist resentment that is cultivated by this propaganda scheme? That we – Bulgarians – are “second-hand Europeans” and that they – Westerners – “come on all-inclusive package deals to Bulgaria on their welfare payments, while we care for their old people and clean their houses.” Judging from the reactions of the people in the interviews and the focus groups, it’s not that people in Bulgaria are afraid – yes, there is anxiety, especially among some types of people, but it hasn’t taken an objective form, a form of fearful reaction to a threat. In fact, we have a normalization of threat, and the propaganda effect is achieved less through fears than through the feeling of having been wronged, through incitement of resentments.
Paper draws on 13 semi-structured interviews with journalists from print media and information we... more Paper draws on 13 semi-structured interviews with journalists from print media and information websites to outline their perceptions of their professional world. The interviews were conducted between March and June, 2016, in the frames of the research on the anti-democratic propaganda in Bulgaria. Without exaggeration, both the analysis of media and the interviews with journalists have shown the disintegration of the field of journalism as a differentiated field in Bulgaria. What is this due to? Our interviewees explained it with the commercialization and shift in focus from winning trust to securing higher ratings – the media have come to be understood as entertainment and journalism is trying to adjust to this “commercial” requirement. But this is not the main (or at least not the sufficient) reason. The market, in turn, is changing under pressure from free online media, the reorientation of television towards new formats (of entertainment), and the subsequent fragmentation of audiences. What differentiates print media and news websites however is the drastic merge of entertainment and direct politics through omerta on certain topics and names, through advertorials that are not properly (if at all) marked as such and all this – in the lack of information who the owner of the media is. Our interviewees share a common practical dilemma: you either do journalism, or work for a media corporation. If one wants to do proper journalism, one has to withdraw from the topics of the day to the safer territories of marginal topics.
The paper tries to push further the reflection inspired by Amy Allen's conceptual proposal that t... more The paper tries to push further the reflection inspired by Amy Allen's conceptual proposal that the Foucaltian notion of the care of the self may help contemporary social critique to overcome the aporia of the subject, that care of the self enables us to transcend the power relations that make us 'who we are'. To this end, the paper offers a pragmatist reading of Michel Foucault's later work on what he calls 'technologies of the self'.
The paper traces two versions of the 'ordinary' as it functions within radical social critique an... more The paper traces two versions of the 'ordinary' as it functions within radical social critique and within pragmatistically reinterpreted critique, both of them suspending the privileged status of theorizing, though the former not yet abandoning it. Radical critique refers to the ordinary in the sense of undefined, attributeless, unarticulated suffering. Thus the ordinary turns out to be equivalent to the figure of desire that should remain erotically unarticulated if it is to be an authentic source of resistance free of power relations. Pragmatist social critique, on the other hand, diagnoses the blindness of radical critique to the critical activities of the ordinary itself but runs the risk of uncriticaally reaffirming its claims.
The book puts together critical social theory and philosiphical pragmatism to create tools of thi... more The book puts together critical social theory and philosiphical pragmatism to create tools of thinking how social change comes about and to distinguish social pathologies that liberalism generates from social pathologies that liberalism cannot prevent.
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Papers by Milena Iakimova
Without exaggeration, both the analysis of media and the interviews with journalists have shown the disintegration of the field of journalism as a differentiated field in Bulgaria. What is this due to? Our interviewees explained it with the commercialization and shift in focus from winning trust to securing higher ratings – the media have come to be understood as entertainment and journalism is trying to adjust to this “commercial” requirement. But this is not the main (or at least not the sufficient) reason. The market, in turn, is changing under pressure from free online media, the reorientation of television towards new formats (of entertainment), and the subsequent fragmentation of audiences. What differentiates print media and news websites however is the drastic merge of entertainment and direct politics through omerta on certain topics and names, through advertorials that are not properly (if at all) marked as such and all this – in the lack of information who the owner of the media is. Our interviewees share a common practical dilemma: you either do journalism, or work for a media corporation. If one wants to do proper journalism, one has to withdraw from the topics of the day to the safer territories of marginal topics.
Without exaggeration, both the analysis of media and the interviews with journalists have shown the disintegration of the field of journalism as a differentiated field in Bulgaria. What is this due to? Our interviewees explained it with the commercialization and shift in focus from winning trust to securing higher ratings – the media have come to be understood as entertainment and journalism is trying to adjust to this “commercial” requirement. But this is not the main (or at least not the sufficient) reason. The market, in turn, is changing under pressure from free online media, the reorientation of television towards new formats (of entertainment), and the subsequent fragmentation of audiences. What differentiates print media and news websites however is the drastic merge of entertainment and direct politics through omerta on certain topics and names, through advertorials that are not properly (if at all) marked as such and all this – in the lack of information who the owner of the media is. Our interviewees share a common practical dilemma: you either do journalism, or work for a media corporation. If one wants to do proper journalism, one has to withdraw from the topics of the day to the safer territories of marginal topics.