Yanitsa Ganeva

• Since 04/2025: Full member of the graduate programme "Glocal Religiosities: Entanglements, Identities, Belongings"
• Since 04/2024: Research associate and doctoral candidate at the Chair of Cultural History of Orthodox Christianity, University of Erfurt
• 2021-2023: M.A. in Religious Studies, University of Erfurt
• Feb. 2023 - Sep. 2023: Student Research assistant at the Max Weber-Kolleg Erfurt
• 2018-2024: Student assistant at the Department of Religious Studies and the Chair of Cultural History of Orthodox Christianity
• 2016-2021: B.A. in Religious Studies and Philosophy, University of Erfurt

The Religious Landscape of Socialist Bulgaria (1946-1989) - Institutional and Individual Aspects from a Religious Studies Perspective

While the study of post-socialist settings is becoming increasingly common in religious studies and sociology, religion in socialist contexts paradoxically remains a blind spot in research. The project aims to contribute to closing this gap by analysing the case study of socialist Bulgaria (1946-1989). Structured as a historical periodisation of religious negotiation processes, the research project uses constructivist qualitative tools to examine how religious life, identities and narratives were formed and changed under Bulgarian socialism, which actors were involved in these processes and how they acted, resisted or fell silent. Particular attention must be paid to the fact that each phase represents a different configuration of religious politics, religious-institutional dynamics and individual religiosity, but that there are also recurring motifs and overarching narratives that make the case study unique. Conscious and unconscious political references to instructions and forms of action in the Soviet Union make Bulgaria a "simulacrum" for the general functioning of glocalisation processes. The project therefore also aims to shed light on how supra-regional religious policy was applied, transformed and ultimately glocalised in local settings.

The work follows the guiding principle of the grounded theory methodology "all is data" and analyses political and institutional reports, records and documents from archives and collections as well as private correspondence and narrative interviews in order to be able to draw as broad a picture as possible of the events during the period of socialism in Bulgaria and the various phases and ruptures. Embedded in the foundations of the sociology of knowledge according to Berger and Luckmann and various contemporary (religious) scientific models (lived religion, memory theory, oral history, etc.), the project aims to make the results of the analysis of the Bulgarian case applicable to other social settings.