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.
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