HIST 481 / SOC 491 / INST 300

Geographies of Europe:

Bulgaria & Turkey

Costello / Scarboro

King’s College Short Term Faculty Led Study Abroad Program,

Summer 2015

I.  Course Description

This course is designed to investigate the creation, transformation, and enforcement of borders as historical and sociological phenomena by “reading” these borders in the geography of the Balkan region of Eastern Europe.  Outside the conveniences of maps and ideas of tectonic plates Europe (and, by extension, the West) has never been a fixed space, but rather always resides within the flexible and permeable boundaries of convention – a convention that reflects and emanates from both material and ideological struggles between social actors with competing claims, agendas, and resources. Who belongs to Europe, who is excluded, and the consequences of this demarcation have changed dramatically over time, even as the underlying social processes that constitute border-making have not. Bulgaria and Turkey provide an important space to come to terms with the question that these boundaries raise —one country recently added to the European Union (though in a provisional way) the other, increasingly restively, waiting in line. The Balkans are a region where historical markers frame present understandings of religious, national and post-national space and identity.  The founding metaphor for the Balkans is that of a bridge linking two different worlds—a hybridized space belonging completely to both and to neither (what exactly, after all, does “Turkey in Europe” mean?  What does the “west” mean on the boundary of the “east”?   How do these ideas and structures impact societies across this border?).  But the bridge too is a space—one with categories, meanings, and understandings of its own.  We will investigate the history, societies, and cultures of the Balkans as a space where notions of Europe and Asia, West and East, past and present, and Islam and Christianity coincide and intersect in remarkable fashion.  

II.  Purpose

In traveling from Bulgaria to Turkey students will be asked to investigate several important questions: How are borders naturalized?  What ideological work do these borders do?  What are the costs and benefits to “joining Europe” or alternately, being “left out?”  How are these issues relevant to our own culture and society?  Being in the Balkans will give the students the unique experience of being able to historicize these questions—to see their expression and transformation through culture.  

This program will help students understand the importance (and possibilities) of interacting successfully with another culture across widely perceived differences (both between themselves and the people of the countries that we will visit and amongst those very people).  The linkages between high politics and the daily lives of the people of both countries will be made clear in our investigation of the vast importance socially, politically, and culturally of membership in or exclusion from the European Union (and the vigorous debates within Turkish society today about the benefits and costs of such membership).  Students should return to King’s with an understanding of these connections and the methodological and experiential tools to apply these understandings and questions to their own culture and society.

A.  Goals

1)     Develop an interdisciplinary global comparative perspective

2)     Develop understanding and appreciation for the variety of human societies

3)     Encourage both the capacity and the desire to travel outside of familiar geographic and intellectual landscapes.

4)     Gain a deeper understanding of the place of Bulgaria, Turkey, Europe, and ‘the West’ in the contemporary world

5)     Develop an understanding of the selective nature of historical narratives and their contribution to regional and national identities

6)     Gain increased awareness of the contested and complex nature of national identity, and understand the concept of national identity as a vehicle for analyzing contemporary and historical, events, issues, relations, and processes.

B.  Objectives

1)     Identify the major social, political, economic, historical, and cultural issues that influence our notion of Bulgaria and Turkey, and their relationships to Europe, the United States, and “the West”

2)     Apply the transferable skills of a liberal arts education – Critical Thinking, Effective Writing, Effective Oral Communication, Information Literacy, Technology Competency, Quantitative Reasoning, Moral Reasoning – to a critical understanding of Western Civilization.

3)     Apply the skills and knowledge developed within the major program of study to issues of global importance, and how they interact with commonplace understandings about the role of the West. 

4)     Apply global lessons to the local community and vice versa, through an interrogation of the students’ personal identity as “Western” (or, perhaps, as “non-Western”).

5)     Engage with the international community through foreign travel experience.

6)     Use an interdisciplinary global comparative perspective to consider American national identity and the role of the United States in the contemporary world

7)     Describe how national identity is created in the visual landscape, through selective historical narratives, and in contrast to marginalized places, cultures, and populations

8)     Describe how borders and nation-hood are naturalized, the ideological work that these borders accomplish

9)     Describe the costs and benefits of privilege (European-ness/American-ness/ Western-ness), the relevance of national identity in the contemporary world with regards to the lived experience of its constituents and collaborators, and the salience of  national identity in cross-national/global social, political, and economic relations

III.  Course Requirements

A.  Program Structure.

This short-term faculty led study abroad program consists of three phases: a pre-travel phase  consisting of the spring semester prior to travel, the travel phase consisting of our time abroad, and the post-travel phase that concludes with the final due date for all written work on Friday 31 July, 2015. As such, students should expect to engage in reading, writing, and instructional activities throughout ALL THREE PHASES of the program.

What you should expect from the program:

Pre-travel: In the spring of 2015, you are required to attend approximately 6 hours of orientation sessions, where we will cover cultural competency, survival vocabulary, and course requirements and expectations. You will have a small amount of reading and one written assignment due during this phase.

Travel: The 2-3 weeks of travel for this program in May/June 2015 comprises the bulk of instructional time for this course. Expect to spend about 45 hours per week – just like a regular full-time job, folks! – in various course activities, including but not limited to instruction, experiential learning, seminar discussions, reading, photographing, and writing. It is of paramount importance that you keep up to date in your reading and writing activities during the travel portion, as they lay the foundation for assignments due upon your return, as well as counting as part of your grade in their own right.

Post-travel: All written work is due by Friday 31 July. During this time, Drs. Costello and Scarboro are available to consult with you individually as you complete your post-travel assignments; you are required to schedule at least one consulting session with one of us, and attend a group debriefing session to be held in late summer.

Although the schedule for a short-term faculty led study-abroad program differs from a traditional classroom-based course, you should expect to spend about the same amount of time overall. Writing requirements are equivalent for the two types of classes; reading requirements tend to be lower for STFLSA classes than for classroom courses, but STFLSA courses dedicate more time to individual and small group instruction and experiential learning, during which students are “reading” landscapes and populations. In short, expect that your STFLSA program will provide a rich, rewarding, immersive learning experience – not an easy shortcut to 3 credits.

B.  Assignments

Pre-travel phase

10%                 Monuments and American identity. Visit a local monument as if you were a tourist – what does this monument claim to represent, and how does this representation connect to broader narratives of local and/or national identity?  What do you observe that supports the claims that this monument either explicitly or implicitly makes, and what do you observe that may undermine or contradict these claims? You will present your findings to the class during the final pre-departure orientation session to be held in late spring.

                                    [Goals 4, 5, 6; Objectives 2, 3, 5, 7]

Travel phase

20%                 Journal entries. At each of the sites during the travel portion of the course, students will be asked to answer a series of short directed questions in a journal. Student will chose three questions associated with the site (from the syllabus) to reflect on.  Each of the three answers should be no more than two paragraphs.  These journal entries are due the day of our group discussion for the site (noted on the syllabus) and will be a starting point for our conversations during these meetings.   Upon your return, you will select one of these journal entries as a point of departure for your analytic essay (see below).

[Goals 1, 2, 3; Objectives 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8]

25%                 Participation. At every stop during the program there will be informal and formal discussions of the questions outlined below and the readings assigned.  To earn this grade, it is necessary but not sufficient to simply “go along for the ride” – you must also demonstrate active engagement with the activities and discussions that form the academic core of this class.

 [Goals 1-6; Objectives 1-8]

20%                 Monuments and Bulgarian/Turkish national identity (2). Similar to the “Monuments and American Identity” pre-departure assignment, you will describe and analyze the rhetorical claims that a given monument makes about national identity.

                                    [Goals 4, 5, 6; Objectives 2, 3, 5, 7]

Post-travel phase

10%                 Monuments and American national identity, revisited. Upon your return to the United States, you will complete another version of the pre-departure monument assignment for a different local monument. In addition to completing this assignment as indicated above, you should also address the following: has your perspective on American-ness changed? How? In what way did your travel in Bulgaria and Turkey influence your perspective?

[Goals 1, 2, 5, 6; Objectives 2, 3, 5, 7]

15%                 Analytic essay. Consider any one of the program questions (see below) in an analytic essay. This essay should be approximately 5-7 pages in length and incorporate a minimum of 6 scholarly sources, at least 3 of which should be drawn from the course readings.

[Goals 1,2,4, 6; Objectives 1-7 ]

C.  Schedule

Section I—Sofia:

Hotel: 

            Lion Hotel, 60 Maria Luiza Boulevard < http://sofia.hotelslion.bg/ >

Readings:       

1) Todorova, Maria, “The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov as lieu de mémoire,” Journal of Modern History, vol 78, no. 2, 2006.

2) Kelleher, Michael, “Bulgaria’s Communist-Era Landscapes,” The Public Historian, vol. 31, no.3 Summer 2009.

3) Guentcheva, Rossitsa, “Past Contested: The Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia,” National Museums and the Negotiation of Difficult Pasts Conference Proceedings from EuNaMus, Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Brussels 26-27 January 2012.

Optional:

1) Genova, Irina and Georgi Gospodinov, Inventarna kniga na sotzializma (Inventory Book of Socialism), Prozoretz, 2006.

Schedule:

Questions:

1.      What is the narrative created by the exhibition at the National History museum in Sofia?  What elements are national?  How does this relate to questions of belonging to Europe?  What elements of the Thracians are Bulgaria?  Which are European? How does one make such a distinction?  What are the stakes involved in each claim?

2.      What does the memorial cathedral Aleksandur Nevski contribute to understandings of Bulgarianess?  How is it distinct from Sveta Nedeliia?  What role do the national branches of Orthodox churches play in questions of national identity?  How are these understandings complicated in the case of Bulgaria and Aleksandur Nevski?

3.      How do we write the story of the Banya Bashi Mosque and the second largest synagogue in Europe into the story of Bulgaria?

4.      Rila is understood by most Bulgarians as a repository of national identity (and a placewhere the “European” nature of Bulgaria survived the “500 year yoke” of the Ottoman Empire).  What story does Rila Monastery tell?  How does this frame the understanding of “Bulgarianess”?  What are the limits and possibilities of such understandings?

5.      Where does socialism live in the Bulgarian landscape? How does the legacy of socialism complicate our reading of Bulgarian space?  How does the Bulgarian landscape deal with the problem of socialism in terms of public space? How was communism modeled in its art?  What type of world was to be born?  What does this say about the representations of Bulgarian-ness offered by the sites we’ve seen?

6.      To what extent has the legacy of socialism become commercialized? In what ways? Does commercialization “solve” the problem of heritage dissonance? What are the implications for Bulgarian identity?

Section II—Veliko Turnovo:

Hotel: 

            Slavianska Dusha, 21 Nikola Zlatarski ul. < http://slavianska-dusha.com/sl-dusha/en/ >

Readings:       

1) Paisij Hilendarski’s Slavo-Bulgarian History (1762)

2) Dr. Petŭr Beron’s “Fish Primer” (1824)

2) Scarboro, “Touring the Sacred and the Socialist Humanist Self,” from The Late Socialist Good Life in Bulgaria: Meaning and Living in a Permanent Present Tense, Lexington Press, 2011

Schedule:

Questions:

1.   What is the relationship between the 2^nd Bulgarian kingdom and the modern state?  Why reconstruct Tsarevets? What ideological work does it do?  How are Svetlin Rusev’s frescos in the cathedral relate to Bulgaria’s understood religious tradition (both in the 1980s and today) and the socialist state that commissioned them?

2.   What sense are we to make of the Bulgarian Renaissance (or Revival)?  How is it a Renaissance (or, for that matter a revival)?  What connection does it have to the Ottoman experience?  National construction?  3.   For whose gaze is Veliko Turnovo contructed?  What is the story the city is designed to tell?  What relationship does it have to the communist past?  How might the experience have been different 25 years ago?

Section III—Sunny Beach:

Hotel: 

Lion Hotel, Slianchev briag < http://sunnybeach.hotelslion.bg/ >

Readings:       

Schedule:

Questions:

1.      What is the narrative of the Shumen Monument (1,300 years of the Bulgarian State)?  What is the connection between 681 and 2015?  Why should we care? Do we?

2.      What does Bulgaria look like from the vantage point of Nesebur and its environs? How is the public narrative of "Bulgarian-ness" expressed here -- and how does it compare to the narrative of Bulgarian-ness from previous sites? What does this site add to the narrative?

3.      In what ways can we read into the recreational spaces of the Black Sea Coast as aspirational places? That is, what is the message that one is meant to read from Sunny Beach, and how/to what extent has this message changed in the post-socialist era?

4.      How/to what extent has globalization contributed to defining towns such as Sunny Beach as sites of both recreation and aspiration?

5.      How do we make sense of Nesebur as a tourist site? A ruin?  A Bulgarian site?  In light of the population transfers of the early 20^th century, how is it a site of loss?  What is gained?

6.      Many scholars of globalization contend that it is impossible to fully describe the scope, dynamics, and consequences of globalization without first understanding it as a fundamentally gendered phenomenon. In what ways does coastal Bulgaria illustrate and/or complicate this understanding of the relationship between globalization and gender?

7.      What are the consequences of a national brand? To what extent can we read the Bulgarian landscape as a self-consciously branded landscape? What are the key elements of the Bulgarian brand, both real and ideal? What’s the relationship between national identity and national brand?

Section IV—Istanbul:

Hotel: 

Santa Sophia, Sokak No:2 Sultanahmet / Fatih, Istanbul < http://www.santasophia.com/ >

Readings:       

Schedule:

Questions:

1.      What was the impact of crossing from Bulgaria to Turkey?  How would you describe the frontier? How do you know that you are in Turkey and not Bulgaria?  Are you in Europe or Asia?  Where were you in Bulgaria?

2.      What story should we tell about Hagia Sophia?

3.      How does the Blue Mosque transform Sultanhammet?  How does it write the area into European narratives?  Ottoman narratives? 

4.      How is the story of the Archeological museum in Istanbul different than that in Sofia?  How does this complicate and expand our understandings of “Europeaness”?

5.      How is the art museum in Istanbul different from that in Haskovo?  What stories were each of the galleries hoping to tell?

6.      The Bosporus is the geographical boundary between Europe and Asia?  How does one experience this border?  What is the difference between the Asian and European side?   How would you draw the border of Europe?

7.      What’s the relationship between Istanbul as a city of the past (Hagia Sofia) and Istanbul as a city of the future? How easy is it to reconcile the historical narrative of Istanbul with current demographic realities? Where are the points of tension? Examples?

8.      Istanbul has existed as what we currently refer to as a “global city” for centuries. Is the more recent phase of globalization a continuation of this global-ness or does it represent a turning point between past and future? What’s the relationship between economic role and culture, past and present? How do we see these relationships inscribed upon the landscape?

Section V—Bursa:

Hotel: 

Kervansaray Bursa City Hotel, Fevzi Çakmak Cad. No: 31 Osmangazi, Bursa Türkiye

< http://www.kervansarayhotels.com.tr/subpage.asp?hotelID=5&hotel=Kervansaray-Bursa---City-Hotel&id=1591&content=CONTACT >

Readings:       

Schedule:

Questions:

1.      How does Bursa stand in relation to Istanbul re: Turkish history, national identity, and the relationship between East and West?

2.      Bursa gained international attention in the late 1980s when tens of thousands of Bulgarian Turks sought permanent refuge there in the late throes of Bulgarisation; this movement is generally understood as a story of ethnic cleansing and nationalism gone amuck (that is, a story about the Bulgarian state). Are there other ways to understand this population movement that may complicate (if not necessarily contradict) the standard reading of this event? In short, why choose Bursa, specifically?  

3.      How (and to what extent) do the famous tiles of Isnik illustrate the complicated relationship between economic activity and collective identity?

Program Questions:

1.      How is national identity constructed and maintained?

a.      In this construction, what is the role of historical narrative? Geography and landscape? Geopolitical trends and ideologies? Social arrangements and cultural practices? Regional and global economic forces?

b.      What strategies have been employed to deal with competing narratives that are available for the construction of national identity?

2.      How do localized issues of national identity interact with global cultural and economic hierarchies of East vs. West / North vs. South?

3.      How does national identity, as a phenomenon ideologically tethered to a specific geographic territory, influence the lives of individuals who inhabit geographic territories in decidedly more fluid ways?

4.      Why are questions and narratives of “Bulgarian-ness” and/or “Turkish-ness” still relevant in 2015?  How are questions of national identity integrated into contemporary European culture?  What are some of the cultural, political, economic, and historical implications of these questions?

5.      How does globalization influence the narratives of Bulgarian and Turkish national identity? In what ways is globalization apparent in these landscapes? In what ways do these national identity narratives resist, contradict, or undermine the narrative of globalization – and vice versa?

6.      Are discussions of Bulgarian and Turkish national identity in any way relevant for understanding the United States – its place in the world, its relation to contemporary Europe, its relation to the rest of the globe?