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Monthly Spotlight, July 2024
28 June 2024
In this edition of our monthly spotlight we feature two academics: Professor Kristin Bakke (Political Science & EISPS) and Temenuga Trifonova (Creative Arts & Humanities).
Kristin Bakke
Kristin Bakke is Professor of Political Science and International Relations in the Department of Political Science at UCL and a core faculty member in the EISPS programme. Her recent work on Europe includes a study of attitudes vis-à-vis Russia and ‘the West’ in what Russia considers its 'near abroad', conducting studies in Ukraine, Belarus, Nagorno-Karabakh and elsewhere.
In her profile, Kristin writes:
Our Belarus survey happened right before the 2020 pro-democracy protests, and our survey in the de facto state Nagorno Karabakah is the last one that took place there before it was dissolved. We asked people about their views on civil society and foreign agents laws, something that has become ever so topical in Georgia in the last few weeks. And, of course, our Ukraine survey from 2019 now enables us to compare attitudes before and after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022.
Temenuga Trifonova
Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor of Creative Arts & Humanities: Moving Image at UCL and has previously taught at York University (Toronto), the University of New Brunswick and the University of California Santa Cruz. She is an author and screenwriter whose interests range from contemporary visual culture and the sublime to the figure of the migrant in European cinema.
Temenuga writes:
Eastern Europe, and the Balkans in particular, have for a long time served as a repository of negative traits against which ‘Europe’ constructed its own self-image. I grew up in a country obsessed with debates around European identity and ‘belonging’ or ‘not belonging’ to Europe. Even to this day Bulgaria continues to think of itself (and is often thought of) as trying to ‘return to Europe’ after forty years of communist rule.
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