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In the past two months, we have all been consumed by the war in Ukraine, with terrible images of buildings on fire, people fleeing the country and utter destruction filling our screens, newspapers and minds. In this tragic situation, the insecurity and precarity of platform work has become an even clearer reality. In the past few years, the platform economy has found in Ukraine a particularly thriving environment to expand. Thanks to a workforce that is very well-educated, tech-savvy and fluent in English, Ukraine has been a particularly attractive country for companies looking for online freelancers to provide a range …

This year, the Chilean animated short film Beast has been nominated for an Oscar, and in 2015, Bear Story won the award in this same category. Both productions are inspired by the Chilean dictatorship. The first film focuses on a woman torturer while the second concentrates on exile. The topics were not chosen by chance nor were they a strategy; they are part of the social concerns of the post-dictatorship that were not resolved during the so-called transition to democracy. The Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990) is part of the country’s recent past, and fiction has been the predominant mode of expression since 2013, the year …

The first COVID-19 case in Italy was registered on 21 February 2020, thrusting Italy into a state of emergency which quickly produced burdensome economic and social effects. The decrees approved by the Italian government introduced restrictions on travel and socializing, culminating in lockdown. Although all these measures made it possible to limit the risks of contagion, they had numerous consequences regarding men and women’s personal and professional conditions.  Considering the full extent of the effects brought on by the pandemic would involve a lengthy in-depth analysis, so we choose to limit our attention to how social institutions, family and school …

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 …