Combinatorial tangle Floer homology

In this paper we extend the idea of bordered Floer homology to knots and links in $S^3$: Using a specific Heegaard diagram, we construct gluable combinatorial invariants of tangles in $S^3$, $D^3$ and $I\times S^2$. The special case of $S^3$ gives back a stabilized version of knot Floer homology.Comment: 106 pages, 44 figure

Rethinking banal nationalism: Banal Americanism, Europeanism, and the missing link between media representations and identities

This article was published in International Journal of Communication ©Vera Slavtcheva-petkova under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence.This article questions some tacit assumptions underpinning Michael Billig’s banal nationalism concept but also confirms the ongoing relevance of aspects of his central argument. It demonstrates that the taken-for-granted link between banal flaggings of nationalism in the media and national identities is highly problematic. Drawing on a content analysis of seven TV news and current affairs programs and an audience study with 174 children in Bulgaria and the United Kingdom as well as Eurobarometer survey data on adults, this article explores two “derivatives” of banal nationalism: banal Europeanism and banal Americanism. It demonstrates that banal nationalism does not entirely work as Billig anticipated in contexts outside the respective country’s national borders, especially regarding examples of deixis in the media coverage or embedded identities

Children, Europe and the media: a comparison between Bulgaria and England

Children, Europe and the media: a comparison between Bulgaria and Englan

“We Are Not Fools”: Online News Commentators’ Perceptions of Real and Ideal Journalism

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern European countries face an increasing threat to their media pluralism and democracies after a lot of media corporations fell in the hands of local owners. The region is plagued by “mini-Murdochs,” and Bulgaria is a case in point. This study investigates a subset of Bulgarian online newspaper readers’ perceptions of the state of journalism. The article presents the results from a qualitative analysis of 1,583 comments about the media war between the country’s biggest press groups. It focuses on 178 comments that discuss the role of journalists. Readers differentiate between “ideal journalism” and “real journalism.” The former is based on an idealized view of journalists as detached watchdogs, whereas the latter depicts a dire picture of journalists as manipulative servants of their owners. The virtual space is a vibrant arena for democratic discussions and can also potentially serve as an accountability tool for journalists. A reconceptualization of Habermas’s public sphere is needed if we are to more clearly understand how vibrant online spaces contribute to democracy even if they fall short of his normative ideal

A friendly introduction to the bordered contact invariant

We give a short introduction to the contact invariant in bordered Floer homology defined by F\"oldv\'ari, Hendricks, and the authors. The construction relies on a special class of foliated open books. We discuss a procedure to obtain such a foliated open book and present a definition of the contact invariant. We also provide a "local proof", through an explicit bordered computation, of the vanishing of the contact invariant for overtwisted structures.Comment: Expanded the exposition, reorganized, and added new examples. 23 pages, 17 figure

Towards a Sociology of the EU: The Relationship between Socio-economic Status and Ethnicity and Young People’s European Knowledge, Attitudes and Identities

This article explores the relationship between social backgrounds—socio-economic status and ethnicity—and European knowledge, identities and attitudes to European Union (EU) membership in two member states—the Eastern European newcomer Bulgaria and the Western European notoriously Eurosceptic United Kingdom. Itadopts an empirical sociological approach in line with recent calls for more sociological input into EU studies. By drawing on 174 individual interviews with 9-/10-year-old primary school pupils, the article is focused on young people: a group that ‘holds the key’ to the future of the EU, yet is entirely neglected by academics and policy makers. The findings suggest that despite the substantial national differences, the significance of socio-economic status and ethnicity is strong cross-nationally. European identity is largely elite and racialized and those at the margins of society in my sample are not at all involved in the European project. A key theoretical contribution this article makes is to move beyond mono-causal explanations by providing an account of the intersection of national context, socio-economic status and ethnicity in relation to young people’s European identities

Bordered Floer homology and contact structures

We introduce a contact invariant in the bordered sutured Heegaard Floer homology of a three-manifold with boundary. The input for the invariant is a contact manifold $(M, \xi , \mathcal {F})$ whose convex boundary is equipped with a signed singular foliation $\mathcal {F}$ closely related to the characteristic foliation. Such a manifold admits a family of foliated open book decompositions classified by a Giroux correspondence, as described in [LV20]. We use a special class of foliated open books to construct admissible bordered sutured Heegaard diagrams and identify well-defined classes $c_D$ and $c_A$ in the corresponding bordered sutured modules