Raia Apostolova is assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences whose work focuses on migration, labor, and social reproduction in postsocialist Europe. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology and social anthropology from the Central European University, where she completed a dissertation, now reworked into a recent book on ‘Capitalism and Migration: freeing and hunting labor power across the European Union’.
For this Summa Cum Laude dissertation, she did six years of fieldwork. Her research took her to detention centers for undocumented migrants; to homeless encampments and squatted spaces on the streets of Munich, Berlin, and Sofia; to informal labor sites, where Eastern Europeans confront humiliation and repression; and along European roads carrying thousands toward overexploitation, social abandonment, bodily injury, and sometimes death. She conducted research in public services sites, where access to welfare and housing is negotiated and often denied; and in countless solidarity spaces, where people struggle to dismantle the violence embedded in all this.
Apostolova’s research engages especially with the distinctions between “economic” and “political” migrants, the production of “restless bodies,” and the ways socialist and postsocialist histories shape contemporary migration regimes in Europe.
Apostolova’s fieldwork was never only a scholarly endeavor. Her political engagement in grassroots migrant solidarity networks, organizing and advocating for migrants’ economic and political rights are integral to her epistemology. Witnessing first-hand the cruelty and violence inflicted upon bodies in motion, and alongside academic work, Apostolova has been active in critical public debates on Europe’s refugee and migration politics.
In her forthcoming book on socialism and migration, Apostolova asks whether migration might be reimagined as an anticolonial strategy and as a practice of solidarity – one capable of reckoning regions wounded by coerced exodus and dispossession.
