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One year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic, Italy has gone through three pandemic waves, with related closures, restrictions, and reopenings. With around 75% of the population vaccinated, the media talks about reaching herd immunity, while the government recently enforced the use of a vaccine “Green pass” to prevent a new surge of cases. Alternating tensions and relaxations in social distancing and access to public spaces, however, have not always trickled onto the world of birth and birthing, in which a certain policy rigidity lingers. The three of us have spent a significant part of our research time conducting …

Some puzzling developments can be observed in West European populist radical right politics. These highly masculinised political parties, championing traditional models of the family, are increasingly mobilising gender equality issues to attack migrants, in particular by depicting Islam as incompatible with women’s rights (see suggested reading one). In the context of rising hostility towards Muslims, the issue of gender equality is a battlefield for anti-immigration actors. The echo of the Cologne events on New Year’s Eve 2016 testifies to the transnational relevance of this rhetoric. These parties thus aim to ‘modernise’ their public images and address a wider audience beyond their traditional (largely male) constituencies.  Indeed, …

Anti-gender mobilization in Italy. Like in many other countries in the world, in Italy the mobilization against the so-called gender ideology is still very lively. It emerged around 2013, when a vast array of conservative NGOs (such as pro-life and Catholic organizations), right-wing parties and far-right groups joined to protest against proposals aimed at recognizing same-sex families, punishing hate-speech and hate-crimes against LGBT people, implementing school programs to combat gender and sexual stereotypes. Since its emergence, this protest has helped anti-feminist and anti-LGBT subjects to achieve important results. As an example, the law on same-sex civil unions which passed in …

Rosaria Lumino (on behalf of the chairs and members of ESPAnet Italia – the Italian Network for Social Policy Analysis) – 4th May 2021 Gianni Sgritta was an extraordinary person, a great humanist and remarkable sociologist. To talk and share thoughts with him, was a great pleasure. He owned a remarkable sense of irony, a deep knowledge of sociological disciplines, an excellent competence on statistical tools surrounded by a vastness of readings far beyond sociology. We remember with mercy his civic commitment for progressive and reformist politics, with a permanent personal engagement. Selfless by power, often concerned by the future of …

On February 28th at 11 p.m. Giovanni Battista Sgritta, professor emeritus of Sociology at Sapienza University of Rome has left us, at the age of 78, leaving an indelible mark in our lives.  In his research activity, he has dealt with social inequalities, poverty and the difficult processes of inclusion of those who are in disconnected existential trajectories. Through time he has shifted his focus from childhood to adulthood, to concentrate on old age finally.   We wish to remind him, translating in English one of his last interviews, in which he analyses what we are experiencing today, and compares the recent crisis, …

Recent years have seen the rise of polarisation across Europe, and concern over the role it plays in creating violent extremism. The need for understanding the causes of violent extremism has been made all the more prescient by the start of the global international health crisis in 2020, as researchers and policy-makers express alarm at how the COVID-19 pandemic has opened up new opportunities and created new tactics by Far Right extremist groups. Seeking to understand how polarisation and violent extremism develop and interact is the Building Resilience against Violent Extremism and Polarisation (BRaVE) project, a Horizon2020 EU Commission-funded project, …

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 …