About

Hi, I’m Roberta Koleva, a social anthropologist writing at the edges of social theory, visual arts, politics, poetry, architecture, and the everyday life.

Most of my work is grounded in Bulgaria at the crossroads of post-socialism, political imagination, and the material life of infrastructures. I move between urban spaces and archives, empty villages and contested monuments, and stalled socialist megaprojects, tracing how people live, work, negotiate, and dream in places where the ‘future’ repeatedly fails to arrive, but never quite goes away.

In 2025, I started my PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University (Vienna) with an ethnographic project about an unfinished socialist era power plant in Bulgaria and the wider social, ecological and political worlds through which it is continuously brought back to life even as it decays. 

In the meantime, this is the space where I will share fragments of my academic and broader work(-in-progress), minute inspirations, visual practice, notes from readings, film and book commentaries, everyday observations and, occasionally, whatever I’m in the mood for.

I should warn you, I’m a slow writer. My ideas usually arrive uninvited, and... in the meantime - while I'm taking a shower, waiting for the tram, on trains back from fieldwork, in the hour before a deadline, in the margins of my head, and on the very last edges of my notebooks, when the one word I’ve been hunting lands, after I’ve circled it for pages. So the blog will grow gradually, following the irregular rhythms of this in-betweenness that organise my writing (and thinking) process - sometimes put together very well and in a rather finished form (if anything can ever be finished!), sometimes fragmented in its making.

For now, I’m starting with a series of visual-diary posts from Vlad Naumescu’s CEU course Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Filmmaking: short reflections on ethnographic films and course readings, and small experiments in writing with images.