Stelu Şerban
Biographic Data
| ID | 189492 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stelu Şerban |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stelu |
| FAMILY NAME | Şerban |
| SIGNATURE | ŞERBAN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Romanian Academy |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9504-959X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A Shifty Island, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying About Mosquitoes and Love Partial Knowledge
This article examines knowledge produced during an interdisciplinary field trip to Persin Island, a politically charged and ecologically dynamic fluvial island on the Danube. Our collective of environmental humanities and sciences scholars came to describe Persin as shifty: an environment where spatial, temporal, and categorical boundaries never fully stabilize but are continually reconfigured by ecological processes, political projects, and huma…
Underground and Underwater Mining
This paper examines two types of extractive activities: an underground gypsum exploitation and the extraction of sand and gravel from the Danube riverbed. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, access to local archives, and the use of geographic tools, we narrate the story of gypsum extraction in socialist Bulgaria. Following the collapse of a gypsum gallery, the socialist Bulgarian state decided to fill the empty galleries with sand sourced f…
Islands and everyday borders, along the lower Danube between Bulgaria and Romania
Slow ecology
In the first half of the 2000s, one project to restore the former Danube floodplain was carried out in Belene, a marginal town on the Bulgarian Danube. The aim of this article is to record the practices that were already in place before the interventions on the Danube, as part of a heterogeneous local knowledge that had an alternative vision to the scientific knowledge of experts involved in the restoration project. The data comes from qualitativ…
Whose Minority? The Resistant Identity of the Moldavian Csangos
The article is based on my fieldwork in 2002 in a village in Eastern Romania with a multi-confessional population made up mostly of Roman Catholics/Csangos and Orthodox Christians. The core premise of the analysis is that the collective identity manifested here transcends ethnic and confessional divides. The field data about the village’s cross-cultural life fall into the following categories: the oral history of the village, the performing of ri…
Ecological Restoration in “Liquid Societies”
This article tells the story of possibly the first ecological restoration project in the postsocialist world (1994), which is an example of a broader set of ecological restorations carried out in Eastern Europe. By exploring the two intertwined processes of the ecological restoration of an island in the Danube Delta and the advancement of neoliberal economic ideas through land reform, decollectivization, and land privatization, we contribute to t…
Healing waters
This article explores the aspirations of a small community in rural Bulgaria, devastated by postsocialist economic decline. The community's economic and moral aspirations are linked to the ruins of a thermal bath and the existence of a "miraculous spring"– formerly the source of local prosperity and pride. In the context of a vanishing agro-industrial sector, deindustrialisation and a mass exodus of the local population, the bath is the locus of …
Techno-Nationalizing the Levees on the Danube
In this article, I focus on the context in which levees were constructed on the Lower Danube, along the Bulgarian–Romanian border. I argue that after World War II, while the two states shared the management of the river in this region, Romania pursued a techno-nationalist hydraulic policy, which led to the complete damming of the left bank of the Danube with levees. Bulgaria also succeeded in building levees on its side of the Danube, that is the…
Romania and the Quest for European Identity. Philo-Germanism without Germans
State, Technology and Environment on the Lower Danube
The defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Tsarist Empire in the 1877–1878 war created an opportunity for the emergence of new nation states located next to the River Danube, including Bulgaria and Romania. The aim of this paper is to consider the period during which the Danubian landscape was transformed by means of the modest technologies available to the two new nation states. On the one hand, the two nation states appeared to reach a tacit agree…
Dissuading the state
This article seeks to explore the responses of villagers from north-western Bulgaria to neoliberal policies promoted by the post-socialist state in rural areas. We show the two strategies people mobilise in order to defend their interests. A first method is the everyday peasant strategy of resistance: quiet, covered and unopened acts of defiance against the neoliberal policies concerning food acquisition and food production. A second method of re…
The Play of Islands
This paper explores the history of two islands of the Danube River, their movements due to the hydrodynamics of the river and the geopolitical consequences of these movements. The paper shows the process through which the Danube with its hydrological dynamics became a historical actor that provoked military actions, shifted political borders and was the source of intense diplomatic debates between Romania and Bulgaria at the end of the nineteenth…
Healing waters
This article explores the aspirations of a small community in rural Bulgaria, devastated by postsocialist economic decline. The community's economic and moral aspirations are linked to the ruins of a thermal bath and the existence of a "miraculous spring"– formerly the source of local prosperity and pride. In the context of a vanishing agro-industrial sector, deindustrialisation and a mass exodus of the local population, the bath is the locus of …
Dissuading the state
This article seeks to explore the responses of villagers from north-western Bulgaria to neoliberal policies promoted by the post-socialist state in rural areas. We show the two strategies people mobilise in order to defend their interests. A first method is the everyday peasant strategy of resistance: quiet, covered and unopened acts of defiance against the neoliberal policies concerning food acquisition and food production. A second method of re…
The Play of Islands
This paper explores the history of two islands of the Danube River, their movements due to the hydrodynamics of the river and the geopolitical consequences of these movements. The paper shows the process through which the Danube with its hydrological dynamics became a historical actor that provoked military actions, shifted political borders and was the source of intense diplomatic debates between Romania and Bulgaria at the end of the nineteenth…
The Play of Islands
This paper explores the history of two islands of the Danube River, their movements due to the hydrodynamics of the river and the geopolitical consequences of these movements. The paper shows the process through which the Danube with its hydrological dynamics became a historical actor that provoked military actions, shifted political borders and was the source of intense diplomatic debates between Romania and Bulgaria at the end of the nineteenth…
State, Technology and Environment on the Lower Danube
The defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Tsarist Empire in the 1877–1878 war created an opportunity for the emergence of new nation states located next to the River Danube, including Bulgaria and Romania. The aim of this paper is to consider the period during which the Danubian landscape was transformed by means of the modest technologies available to the two new nation states. On the one hand, the two nation states appeared to reach a tacit agree…
Dissuading the state
This article seeks to explore the responses of villagers from north-western Bulgaria to neoliberal policies promoted by the post-socialist state in rural areas. We show the two strategies people mobilise in order to defend their interests. A first method is the everyday peasant strategy of resistance: quiet, covered and unopened acts of defiance against the neoliberal policies concerning food acquisition and food production. A second method of re…
Healing waters
This article explores the aspirations of a small community in rural Bulgaria, devastated by postsocialist economic decline. The community's economic and moral aspirations are linked to the ruins of a thermal bath and the existence of a "miraculous spring"– formerly the source of local prosperity and pride. In the context of a vanishing agro-industrial sector, deindustrialisation and a mass exodus of the local population, the bath is the locus of …
Techno-Nationalizing the Levees on the Danube
In this article, I focus on the context in which levees were constructed on the Lower Danube, along the Bulgarian–Romanian border. I argue that after World War II, while the two states shared the management of the river in this region, Romania pursued a techno-nationalist hydraulic policy, which led to the complete damming of the left bank of the Danube with levees. Bulgaria also succeeded in building levees on its side of the Danube, that is the…
Romania and the Quest for European Identity. Philo-Germanism without Germans
Whose Minority? The Resistant Identity of the Moldavian Csangos
The article is based on my fieldwork in 2002 in a village in Eastern Romania with a multi-confessional population made up mostly of Roman Catholics/Csangos and Orthodox Christians. The core premise of the analysis is that the collective identity manifested here transcends ethnic and confessional divides. The field data about the village’s cross-cultural life fall into the following categories: the oral history of the village, the performing of ri…
Ecological Restoration in “Liquid Societies”
This article tells the story of possibly the first ecological restoration project in the postsocialist world (1994), which is an example of a broader set of ecological restorations carried out in Eastern Europe. By exploring the two intertwined processes of the ecological restoration of an island in the Danube Delta and the advancement of neoliberal economic ideas through land reform, decollectivization, and land privatization, we contribute to t…
Slow ecology
In the first half of the 2000s, one project to restore the former Danube floodplain was carried out in Belene, a marginal town on the Bulgarian Danube. The aim of this article is to record the practices that were already in place before the interventions on the Danube, as part of a heterogeneous local knowledge that had an alternative vision to the scientific knowledge of experts involved in the restoration project. The data comes from qualitativ…
Islands and everyday borders, along the lower Danube between Bulgaria and Romania
A Shifty Island, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying About Mosquitoes and Love Partial Knowledge
This article examines knowledge produced during an interdisciplinary field trip to Persin Island, a politically charged and ecologically dynamic fluvial island on the Danube. Our collective of environmental humanities and sciences scholars came to describe Persin as shifty: an environment where spatial, temporal, and categorical boundaries never fully stabilize but are continually reconfigured by ecological processes, political projects, and huma…
Underground and Underwater Mining
This paper examines two types of extractive activities: an underground gypsum exploitation and the extraction of sand and gravel from the Danube riverbed. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, access to local archives, and the use of geographic tools, we narrate the story of gypsum extraction in socialist Bulgaria. Following the collapse of a gypsum gallery, the socialist Bulgarian state decided to fill the empty galleries with sand sourced f…
Political science (8 works) · Geography (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · Balkans: History, Politics, Society (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Political economy (4 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (3 works)