International research studies and national reports point out two specific aspects which characterize women's academic careers (cf. Eagly, 2003; Glass and Cook, 2016). First, few women advance to senior academic roles. Second, although female academics progress in numbers equivalent to their male colleagues up to a certain point, in most cases their academic career paths either stop before they arrive at tenured positions or they remain in the lower ranks of the hierarchical academic structure. Thus, while the numeric growth and temporal extension of fixed-term positions has, overall, increased women's opportunities for researching and teaching at universities, on the other hand, it has impeded their access to tenured positions. To better highlight this dynamic, this article focuses on the situation of female adjunct professors in Italy. The interest in adjunct professors is twofold: on the one hand, the social and economic status of adjunct professors in the Italian academic system have worsened over time, from independent to formal independent workers; on the other hand, compared with other non-tenured positions, there are substantially fewer female adjunct professors than male. We first provide an overall picture of the historical and juridical transformations of the rank distribution of faculty in Italian universities from the perspective of gender. As a second step, we compare the actual working conditions of female and male adjunct professors on the basis of a survey carried out from January to October 2018 (5,556 respondents corresponding to more than 20% of the population) and semi-structured interviews with 31 adjunct professors. The aim of the analysis is to pinpoint objective and subjective gender similarities and differences regarding both socioeconomic variables and the ways male and female adjunct professors think about their academic and extra-academic work; how they experience the academic environment between paid and unpaid work, construct their professional/academic identity, and imagine their professional future and perceive problems related to the administration and organization of their academic work.
This article examines the relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), departing from the crucial role the State played there in organizing, and controlling all fields of cultural production. Much of the literature on the subject either depicts the interaction between the State and artists as unidirectional or represents their relationship as highly conflictual due to contrasting understandings of culture and its functions. In both cases, this tendency to dichotomize makes it hard to explain, for instance, how music genres that had arisen in Western countries could flourish in the GDR despite the official understanding of ‘socialist music’ propagated by the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Conversely, by adopting a field perspective, this article aims to highlight how musicians, the State, and Party representatives competed to shape the symbolic space of the GDR musical field. Hence, instead of understanding Party and State decisions as merely applications of ideological principles, a field perspective enables us to consider them as resulting from strategies, depending on both the objective position occupied in the musical field and its spatial-material dimension, and as aimed at maintaining their own power within it. The political elite succeeded, then, in actualizing its strategy of legitimating emerging music genres which were potentially disrupting until it was able to provide musicians with physical cultural spaces for developing their careers and, at the same time, expressing criticisms. On the other hand, from the 1950s, localized music scenes were created which proposed an alternative understanding of music to the official one without, however, refusing the core principles which structured the GDR musical field. After the end of the 1970s, though, new music scenes were formed which positioned themselves outside the institutionalized music spaces and places, refusing in this way the rules of the GDR musical field and questioning its very existence.
Some twenty years since the reunifi cation of Germany, the cultural and interpersonal communication between eastern and western Germans remains problematic -complicated by oversimplifi ed media representations of the GDR-past that induce an attitude of mistrust towards eastern Germans as well as making them feel unacknowledged. This paper explores the question of German integration post-1989 through an analysis of the documentary series Die Kinder von Golzow (Winfried and Winfried, 1961-2005). The aim is to show how the series, even if marginal in the public memory, offers a cultural meeting ground by narrating the recent past from the perspective of everyday-life. The paper argues that the construction of a political community is not only the result of institutional politics, but also of everyday praxis. In other words, it is necessary to distinguish between two levels of integration in the case of the reunifi cation of Germany: on the one hand the acceptance of institutions of the Federal Republic; and on the other the exchange of historical (collective and individual) experiences, since these form the basis of a cultural and mutual acknowledgment of identity and difference among eastern and western Germans.
This article analyzes the dissemination of sociological knowledge in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) and other fields of cultural production in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), from the early postwar period to German reunification. In this regard, I investigate the relationships between sociology and politics, taking into account the specific contexts of the GDR-State and the institutionalization processes of these disciplines. To prevent a deterministic understanding of political power on academic and scientific systems, I adopt the Bourdieusian concept of field (cf. Bourdieu 1966; 1984; 1985; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Bourdieu and Boltanski 2008). This concept allows me to highlight how the relationship between the academic and political fields changed over time by simultaneously looking at the influences of political, cultural, social and economic transformations of GDR society on the political goals of the GDR-State and the strategies of sociologists within the broader field of production of sociological knowledge.
This paper looks at the national and international geographic mobility paths of young graduates in Italy and their educational and professional trajectories. By departing from the research fields of youth studies, mobility studies and higher education studies, we aim to highlight the multiple meanings and effects that mobility experiences may have in structuring graduates’ future projects and/or desires. On the other hand, we argue that their expectations for both their mobility experiences and careers are also shaped by family socialisation, considering furthermore that the building of embodied and scholastic cultural capitals is spatially differentiated depending on the places where they grow up. The empirical research is based on two rounds of semi-narrative interviews conducted with 51 Italian graduates between 2020 and 2021. For the analysis, we have outlined four types of mobility paths. For each type, we focus on how socio-structural and cultural variables influence the ways the interviewees framed their mobility and professional experiences, desires and projects, focusing furthermore on how the Covid-19 pandemic differently affected their objective possibilities and strategies of mobility between the first and second waves.
This article aims at exploring the complex interplay between sociology and politics during the Nazi Regime by looking at how some nationalist and national-socialist ideas were incorporated in the works of sociologists. In order to do so, I shall focus on the production and dissemination of sociological knowledge, interlacing two levels of analysis. The first level examines the manners in which sociologists linguistically and epistemologically appropriated some key concepts of nationalist thought and national-socialist ideology. The second level considers the pragmatical use of sociological concepts and methods for investigating and recording the daily life of different groups within the Third Reich’s territory. For this purpose, I will first draw an overall picture of the social and symbolic spaces of the sociological field in the interwar period, looking at how some nationalist key concepts gained different meanings over time. I will then analyse the intellectual/scientific trajectories of two sociologists, Adolf Gunther and Erich Rothacker, who began their careers in the second decade of the twentieth century. I argue that, in both cases, the academic/intellectual habitus each author developed before 1933 played a crucial role in determining their rise or decline as sociologists and, broadly speaking, as intellectual figures during the Nazi regime.
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