Industrial Sites: Traces, Transmissions and Memory Regimes
(Plovdiv, 02 – 07 August 2026)
This programme offers a fieldwork-based research environment for ERUA early-career researchers, bringing them together with researchers and students from New Bulgarian University within a shared geographical and cultural setting.
Focused on industrial heritage, it examines industrial spaces as configurations of material traces, social practices, and processes of transmission, as well as carriers of memory in contemporary urban contexts.
This year’s fieldwork takes place in Plovdiv and combines a preparatory theoretical seminar, lectures by local researchers, site visits, and research presentations.
Participants collaborate on two levels: a shared research focus and the practice of international collaboration, connecting local and international perspectives within a common fieldwork of inquiry.
The programme encourages interdisciplinary exchange, collective work, and the development of future research collaborations.
Conceptual Framework
The programme is directly connected to current research on industrial spaces as cultural heritage.
Industrial sites are approached as configurations in which the following intersect:
- material traces (architecture, machinery, infrastructure),
- social practices (labour, organization, knowledge),
- and processes of transmission (of techniques, skills, objects, people, and meanings).
The industrial, whose traces often define the urban landscape, is understood not only as a past stage of modernization linked to mass production, but as an ongoing process that persists through multiple forms of presence.
The focus is on the ways in which industrial sites function simultaneously as:
- sites-as-documents – carriers of traces of human activity that can be “read” through fieldwork and industrial archaeology;
- sites of transmission – where the circulation of knowledge, techniques, and people can be traced;
- sites of memory and of the construction of its functions – where the industrial past is interpreted, rewritten, or displaced.
Particular attention is given to the tension between the archived and the lived, between institutional records and local narratives.
Fieldwork Structure
The programme is structured according to the stages of fieldwork:
- Preliminary phase – field preparation
- Formulation of individual research topics, work with selected sources, preparation of research questions, and organization of individual fieldwork.
- Explorations of industrial Plovdiv.
- Visits to factories and industrial zones, approached as “readable” spaces where traces, transformations, and contemporary uses are analyzed.
- Work in libraries and archives
- Engagement with documents, plans, and technical and administrative materials.
- Discussions and project presentations
- Collective discussions and individual presentations aimed at refining research objects, methods, and analytical frameworks.
Objectives
The programme aims to foster collaborative, international research grounded in a shared fieldwork environment, bringing together participants around a common terrain of inquiry and encouraging the development of joint analytical perspectives across local and transnational contexts.
Application
Applicants are invited to submit:
- an abstract of approximately 300 words,
- a brief biographical note to the following addresses:
Deadline: June 30, 2026
