Recent political protests in Bulgaria, led in part by Gen Z students, workers, and unemployed young people, have sharpened popular demand for a rethinking of both public services and national identity. In the face of continued emigration of young people concerned about the nature of opportunities in Bulgaria, the protesters asked, in part, for a renegotiation of Bulgarian identity. In this context, Kapka Kassabova’s trilogy of biographical family explorations of the experience of the émigré, border lives, and shifting geopolitical landscapes have much to teach us about the interweaving historical geographies of the region. Kassabova’s writing both foreshadows and illuminates Bulgaria’s ongoing struggle about staying, leaving, and renewal.

The paper analyzes the institutions and regulations that govern the transnational movement of dead bodies in contemporary Europe. With the extension of free movement across the European Union and the subsequent expansion of transnational employment, tourism, and retirement, the repatriation of corpses from one member state to another lies in an ambiguous regulatory space. In exploring how dead bodies move between EU member states, and how their movements are regulated within transnational and national systems, the paper pays particular attention to the legacies and continued relevance of mid-century international agreements. Section 1 contextualises the issue of the transportation of mortal remains, discusses our broader theoretical background, and explains our research methods. Section 2 provides an historical overview of the foundational international regulations governing the repatriation of corpses: the 1937 Berlin Agreement and the 1973 Strasbourg Agreement. In Section 3, we present a comprehensive review of the discussion of repatriation of EU citizens between EU countries that occurred in the European Parliament and Commission between 2000 and 2018. In so doing, we focus on the ways in which understanding institutional action and inaction provides a lens on the operation of supranational competency development and its limits, and on the complex ways in which institutional arrangements are interwound within national, international, and transnational practices.

The Journal of Bulgarian Geographical Society was the first scientific geographical journal in the country established in 1933. During the long period of its development, it became a leading journal for publishing scientific results in geography and related interdisciplinary fields in Bulgaria. Geography of the 21st century is expected to contribute to the development of human capital and the knowledge society, to offer place-specific solutions for sustainable regional development and use of the planet’s natural and human capital. One of the main goals of the Bulgarian Geographical Society is to stimulate the geographic community to search for smart spatial solutions which can contribute to meet the challenges of modern society. The Journal of the Bulgarian Geographical Society will contribute to the achievement of this goal by providing a platform for scientists in the main fields of geography and the interrelated sciences as well as decision-makers, and the interested public to share their knowledge in an efficient and open manner. In these days of continuous speeding up of paces of work and life, the idea of facilitating the sharing of existing knowledge in order to create synergies, new knowledge, and innovation is more than timely and our journal can join the efforts to achieve these goals.

In this article, we seek to contribute to cultural-economic geography debates on the social construction of economic value. We widen the focus on already well-studied associations between branded commodities and other entities representing nonmonetary values by also considering what we refer to as ‘dissociations’. Dissociation denotes practices of weakening or obscuring negative links between a branded commodity and other entities in order to let the desired associations overrule undesired ones. We highlight the strategic agency behind such dissociations and thus focus on actors’ proactive relational work to prevent negative associations from becoming salient as well as their reactive practices of managing reputational crises. The article situates the study of dissociations in human geography and pays particular attention to the geographies of dissociation along territorial, relational, and topological lines.

Recent literature has problematized the limits of deeply held assumptions about linear, unidirectional upgrading trajectories in global value chains (GVCs). As firm and chain trajectories and sources of upgrading have changed in recent years, GVC analysis has adjusted to focus on new emerging actors and new distributions of power within value chains. After a discussion of some limits to the treatment of upgrading in the GVC literature, the paper develops a simple extension of the classical model of upgrading in ways that do not presuppose particular valuations of functional, product, and processes upgrading, and that do not fetishize upgrading as such. The paper works with case studies of four Chinese firms located in Ningbo, China. Each 'wears multiple hats' and together they provide illustrative examples of the limits of linear, unidirectional approaches of upgrading. This simple model has the singular advantage of ensuring that trajectories of business upgrading and downgrading in GVCs can be understood as always open, often operating in diverse and contradictory ways. In this sense, the confusion of upgrading with firm strategy with their regional impacts can be avoided.

AbstractAs part of the RegPol2 Project “Socio-economic and Political Responses to Regional Polarization in Central and Eastern Europe” the authors were invited to hold a wide-ranging conversation about critical economic geography and regional development. The context for the conversation was an ongoing research programme involving scholars based in Leipzig and their colleagues interested in the intense processes of regional change in Central and Eastern Europe. The wider project focused on two key issues: first, post-1989 political and economic transformation and the emergence of spatially complex forms of representative democracy and economic forms of private instead of state-led markets and, second, the more recent emergence of new forms of social and regional polarisation and the corresponding political renewal of authoritarian state power in several Visegrad countries. We hope this conversation on the theme of contemporary critical economic geography contributes to broader discussions about post-socialist regional futures.

"Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation, edited by James R. Akerman." Imago Mundi, 71(1), pp. 90–91

The geographer John Pickles defines place as the locus of natural and social life worlds, which provides an operative context of common understandings, institutions, and practices along with the natural environment that sustains the life of communities. He characterizes the defense of these “commons” as the arena in which place-based activism takes center stage. From opposition to mountaintop removal mining to forest and waterways environmentalism, “commons” activism has a long history in Appalachia. The author provides theoretical guidelines for how to think about this activism in relation to the Occupy movement, Right to the City, global labor, and worldwide autonomization movements.

Technologies of Transition: Foreign Investment and the (Re-)Articulation of East Central Europe into the Global Economy 1 - 1