• Vita

    since 2021 University of Münster
    Junior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Legal Unity and Pluralism”
    2020 – 2021 University of Leipzig
    Teaching and Research Assistant
    2018 – 2021 Universität Leipzig
    Master of Arts in Anthropology
    2014 – 2018 University of Aberdeen
    Master of Arts (undergraduate) in Psychology with German

     

  • Research Project

    Global Rights, Local Applications: Negotiating Rights to (Mental) Health in Bulgaria

    Taking an anthropological perspective, this project examines the tensions involved in the local application of global rights to health in postsocialist Bulgaria. To do that the research traces how a plurality of legal and media discourses, socio-cultural practices, health activism, and personal experiences of healthcare in Bulgaria intertwine in a strive for unity.

    To trace these tensions the project foregrounds mental health and the newly emerging activism related to it. It first traces the entanglements between past and present legal discourses and care practices. To do so the study combines archival research with interviews and observations to trace how socialist legal norms and care practices entangle with present day, postsocialist, legal norms, care practices and media discourses pertinent to (mental) health. It then provides a closer examination of present legal and medical discourses and practices related to compulsory treatment and how they relate to activist discourses. In addition, interviews on the personal experiences of people living with a chronic (mental) illness in Bulgaria will also be included to illustrate how the tensions in unifying a plurality of discourses and practices relates to people’s lived experience.

  • Main Areas of Research

    Socialist and post-socialist legal and healthcare practices in Bulgaria

    Global health and its local applications

    Care

    Affect theory

    Phenomenology

    Gender Studies

  • Publications

    Karavasilev, Kostadin, How to Display a Family? The Role of Aesthetics in Perceiving Same-Sex Families with Children, in: Parusheva D./ Antonov, S. (Ed.): The Human and Her/His Surroundings, Plowdiw 2020, 21–35. [Original title: Как се представя семейство?: Ролята на естетиката за възприемането на семействата на еднополови двойки с деца.].
    Link to the Document [in Bulgarian]

    Karavasilev, Kostadin/ Swainson, R./ Prosser, L./ Romanczuk, A., The Effect of Performing versus Preparing a Task on the Subsequent Switch Cost, in: Psychological Research 85/ 1 (2021), 364–383.