Since March 2019, children born in Mayotte, a French department in the Indian Ocean, cannot access French citizenship under the same conditions as children born elsewhere in France. Indeed, a new immigration and asylum law that was voted for in 2018 rendered the right to become French as a teenager (aged 13 at the earliest, on condition of continuous residency since the age of 8) conditional on the legal status of one of the parents at the time of birth – but only for children born on this island 8,000 km distant from Paris. The amendment stirred up vivid debates …

Politics of sexual orientation equality, and the resistance against it again have come to centre stage in national politics across the world. Reflecting on the particular case of Turkey and other international examples we argue that we should explore how and why sexual orientation equality threatens the cis-gender privilege, exposes the fragility of heteronormative cultures and institutional structures and the compulsory nature of heterosexuality. Since the Stonewall riots in the US, there has been a sea change, albeit highly uneven across countries, in social, political and legal recognition of LGBTI+ rights internationally. However these changes in legal and social acceptance …

In many EU countries, the pandemics has represented a window of opportunity for the (re)emergence of a distinctive problematization of the 20th Century school form in the public and policy debate. Such a problematization challenges the basic assumptions of the mode of existence of the school as a gathering and establishes the digital as the ‘magic’ to remake education. The digital is part of a powerful emergence of a discourse of school reform that articulates itself on: a form of technological determinism, which attributes to digital technologies the power (and right) to shape teaching and learning and align them to …

A carbon neutral European Union by 2050 is now the official target of the European Commission with the flagship initiative of the European Green Deal to implement it. The process leading there requires a significantly steeper emissions reduction trajectory than what had been achieved in the past three decades. This will have massive effects on jobs, labour relations and income distribution. It has been clear that this poses a huge challenge for trade unions, as referred to in one of my earlier papers. It has also been recognised early on that addressing climate emergency and to manage the epochal transformation …

The recent economic crisis and mounting budgetary constraints have put severe pressure on social spending, reducing fiscal space for investments in high-quality social services. Given these pressures and in response to a demand for a more ‘efficient’ use of both public and private resources, many studies have thus begun to focus on alternative sources of funding for welfare provision, including ‘impact finance’ tools (McHugh et al. 2013; Dowling, 2016). In several European countries, some banks have launched social bonds to address social issues affecting targeted vulnerable groups or to finance non-profit organizations and social innovation projects. In the same vein, …

Our recent article in the Revue Internationale de Sociologie: International Review of Sociology suggests the journal is opening up as a forum for global sociological analyses of different kinds. The article is titled ‘Comparative colonialisms for queer analysis: comparing British and Portuguese colonial legacies for same-sex sexualities and gender diversity in Africa – setting a transnational research agenda’ (Gomes da Costa Santos and Waites, 2019); and it focuses on the African social contexts of Kenya and Mozambique, as constituted in relation to the imperial nations of the United Kingdom and Portugal.  We are concerned to analyse racist colonialisms with reference …

The traditional dichotomy in sociology of seeing work as either paid (productive or waged) or unpaid (reproductive or unwaged), leads to the marginalization of unpaid work when conceptualizing precarity in both research and policy. This is problematic since it systematically neglects a range of types of unpaid work, both traditional (caring), and emerging (work carried out as a precondition for welfare payments) as well as a totality of economic activities in which workers engage, including those for which people in paid work are not compensated. The situation is still further exacerbated by workers’ need to carry out career development activities, …

How can we explain the growing global problem of tax evasion and tax avoidance? Economic debates often explain these phenomena through models that highlight institutional aspects, such as incentive failures, weak enforcement, or poor legislation that leaves legal loopholes, which are then used to reduce the tax burden. However, if noncompliance was only an institutional problem, all people would respond equally to incentives and enforcement (i.e., appropriate incentives and greater penalties would make us rationally choose to pay taxes). This would also mean that all people have the same motivations: we all want to evade, unless we are controlled and …

Who are the female spies? How does the profession of intelligence changed because more and more women considered this profession as a career opportunity? How to move beyond the “Mata Hari” syndrome: the sexualized, exoticized image of women as the traitors or heroines understanding gender politics of doing intelligence work? Intelligence has always been just like any other paid employment: with time they were gradually integrated in it; and the level of their involvement well reflected the level of women’s emancipation in the given society. Women who worked for the intelligence services got little agency, their progress was slow and …

The crisis of Sociology is nothing new. We have been talking, reading and writing about it since the 70s with Gouldner and more recently with Boudon and Burawoy. The debate in the scientific community has two main parties. The academic purists who reject applied sociology as strongly influenced by policymakers and their interests, and so unable to generate unbiased knowledge. On the other hand, public sociology advocates claim that the passion for social problems, and their study, has always been the legit driving force of this discipline. So, should sociology stick to a role of social phenomena reader & interpreter …