No. 29 (2025): Special Issue dedicated to prof. Ivaylo Ditchev
“Ivaylo was the most insatiably curious person in the world (…)” With these words of Petya Kabakchieva, we would like you to welcome you to this special issue. “He always discovered detail, strangeness, an inversion of the usual in close and distant, unknown or supposedly familiar incidents, phenomena, events, people; he constantly saw things invisible to or unnoticed by us, his colleagues and friends.” (see Petya Kabakchieva, “About Ivaylo, the unorthodox…” in the section “About Ivaylo” at www.seminar-bg.eu)
As wide open and free roaming was Ivaylo’s research curiosity, so was our call for papers for the current issue that we would like to dedicate to him. Some of the texts were presented at the conference “Pop Culture, Pop Politics – the Digital Turn. Interdisciplinary Analyses of the Intersections between Media, Cultures and Politics”, also in loving memory of Prof. Ivaylo Dichev (October 4–5, 2024, Sofia, Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication). Other texts we received in the following months. We did not seek to find a topic that could encompass all the texts in this issue. The unifying link has always been Ivaylo – the eternally searching, the impatient, the insightful, the extraordinary.
As insatiable as his curiosity was, so was his proverbial ability to get lost, especially while doing fieldwork. And if you too get lost in this issue – in the labyrinth of historical periods, themes and topics – then we believe that by doing so we have given you the opportunity to experience (or recollect) how it felt to work and communicate with Ivaylo, to follow his curiosity, to search together with him, to get lost in the wealth of ideas.
Niya Neykova and Valentina Georgieva
Editors of the issue
Cover design: Mina Ditcheva
The current issue 29 of SEMINAR_BG would not be possible without the financial support of the project "Pop Culture, Pop Politics: The Digital Turn. Interdisciplinary Analyses of the Intersection between Media, Cultures and Policies" (2021–2025), funded by the Bulgarian National Science Fund within the framework of the National Program "Fundamental Research", contract number H55/2, 15.11.2021.
