Prof. Ivan Tchalakov

Ivan Tchalakov is Associate Professor at University of Plovdiv and head of the Department of Sociology at the same university. He is also senior research fellow at Technology Studies Group, Department ‘Sociology of Science and Education’ at Institute of Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He has completed his PhD in 1988 at the same institute with a thesis on Marxist sociology of knowledge.

Ivan Tchalakov is working in the fields of Sociology of Sciences and Technologies and Economics of Technical Change. Between 1993-1997 he has carried out an ethnographic study of holographic laboratory (CLOSPI) at BAS, where he developed the notion of heterogeneous micro-community, constituted on the relationships of passivity and responsibility between human and nonhuman actors. Currently he is elaborating these ideas, studying the Byzantine contributions to the Aristotle’s theory of action and its relevance for understanding scientific and engineering practice.

Since the mid-1990s Ivan Tchalakov has also extensively studied the transformation of the research and innovation systems in post-socialist countries. He is working in the filed of historical sociology of socialism and focuses on science and technology development in South-Eastern Europe after WW II.

In 1999 he received The Award of Bulgarian National Fund for Scientific Research for the book "Making a Hologram: A book about Light, about Scientists and their world”, Marin Drinov Academic Publishers, Sofia, Bulgaria. Between 1999 and 2003 he was elected as president of Bulgarian Sociological Association..