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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Inequalities: Social sustainability and gender inequalities: culture, politics and economy

START YEAR 2022

END YEAR 2024

RESEARCH TEAM
Manuela Caiani (PI, SNS Coordinator)

PARTNERS
Simona Forti (SNS); Anna Loretoni, Maria Rosa De Giacomo, Marco Frey, Calogero Oddo (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna)

PROJECT TITLE
Inequalities: Social sustainability and gender inequalities: culture, politics and economy

DESCRIPTION

This project explores with a mixed method approach gender inequalities (their perception and definition by the participants) in three different but interrelated fields (cultural, political and economic), rarely taken into consideration simultaneously by scientific research: in particular in academia, business companies and political participation & mobilization. The focus will be on some crucial (deviant or paradigmatic) Italian cases to be compared with other local case studies in Europe.

The issue of inequality or rather of ‘inequalities’ is a subject of investigation of scientific, socio-political, empirical and normative importance in contemporary democracies. As a multidimensional phenomenon, in its definitions, causes and consequences, this project will look at inequality through the ‘intersectional’ lens of gender inequalities – not only in relation to income, but also to access to services and opportunities – in a word to the broader theme of social sustainability. The economic and financial crisis of 2008 and the Covid-19 health emergency further increased the inequalities already on the rise in Western democracies and exacerbated the gender gap related to nursing and reproductive work. The crucial question becomes: how much inequality can democracy sustain? Gender inequalities in particular occupy a growing space of interest in academic research and policy debate due to the spiraling effects they can have on society at large.

In this project, through some Italian and European case studies, we will look at the state of the art, causes and consequences (perceptions and definition by the agents) of gender inequalities in three different but interrelated fields (cultural, political and economic): in particular Universities, Companies and (places of) Political Participation (conventional and unconventional, i.e. protest). Although existing studies have focused on how to measure inequalities in their multidimensionality, difficulties persist mainly linked to the availability of data, comparability of them, interconnections among different types of inequalities, as well as statistical problems (such as those, in surveys, related to the so called ‘endogeneity’, and causality). In this project, adopting a mixed methods approach that combines quantitative and qualitative data and analysis, we will investigate in details: i. University and gender inequality; ii. Companies and gender gap – new technologies; and iii. Gender inequality and political participation (including voting, women’s participation in political representation roles, but also in grassroots mobilization and social movements). Good practices and policy-oriented recommendations represent the main outcome of the project.

                                  

FUNDING

MIUR – Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (DM n. 289/2021).

 

News

16/05/2023

CFP: Analyzing protest in the digital age. Challenges and opportunities in combining text and video sources

Organizers Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore Swen Hutter, Freie Universität Berlin & WZB Berlin Social Science Center Place and date WZB Berlin Social Science Center, December 7-8, 2023

22/02/2023

15 fully funded PhD positions

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The Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy is pleased to announce 15 PhD fellowships beginning on November 1, 2023. The deadline for applications is April 13, 2023.

16/02/2023

Applications now open! Fourth Edition of the ECPR-COSMOS Summer School on Methods for the Study of Political Participation and Mobilisation

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Applicants must send their application materials no later than March the 17th 2023.

10/01/2022

SNS announces 14 fully-funded PhD positions

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The Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy is pleased to announce 14 PhD fellowships beginning on November 1, 2022.

16/07/2021

Prof. della Porta to lead VolkswagenStiftung-funded ECSEuro project

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Reflecting the European challenge of transnational cooperation and multiple crises, this project asks how local political initiatives across Europe enact citizenship and solidarity and contribute to the vision of a more democratic Europe from below.

09/07/2021

SNS announces 7 fully-funded PhD positions

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The Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore announces 7 fully-funded PhD positions. Deadline for applications: 21 August 2021.

Publications

Journal Article - 2023

Mutual aid and solidarity politics in times of emergency: direct social action and temporality in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Lorenzo Zamponi
From the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing measures introduced created a series of social problems and needs that were partially addressed in Italy as well as in other countries by grassroots mutual aid initiatives. While many of these initiatives were strongly rooted in the Italian social movement and civil society landscape and the choice to engage in mutual aid activities was the result of long years of reflection and planning, the article shows how strongly the temporality of emergency affected the nature of these initiatives, their development and their outcomes, in particular with regard to the extraordinary number of people who volunteered and their relationship with politicisation processes.

Monograph - 2023

Populism and (Pop) Music

Manuela Caiani, Enrico Padoan
The book provides a detailed account of the links between production of popular culture to the rise of populism and contributes to studies on populism and popular culture in Italy, using a comparative approach and a cultural sociology perspective

Journal Article - 2023

Reflective Inclusion: Learning from Activists What Taking a Deliberative Stance Means.

Andrea Felicetti, Markus Holdo
We propose to adopt a principle we call “reflective inclusion,” which allows us to engage abductively with new actions that might expand and deepen our understanding of what deliberation may look like.

Journal Article - 2022

The mobilization for spatial justice in divided societies. Urban commons, trust reconstruction and socialist memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Chiara Milan
The article contributes to the urban studies literature and the study of social movements in divided societies by disclosing the distinctive features and mobilizing potential that the notion of urban commons retains in a war-torn society with a socialist legacy.

Journal Article - 2022

Populists in power and conspiracy theories

Andrea Pirro & Paul Taggart
Looking at three cases of populists in government – Orbán in Hungary, Trump in the United States, and Chávez in Venezuela – we examine the definition of conspiring elites (who), the circumstances under which conspiracy theories are propagated (when), and the ultimate purpose of conspiratorial framing (why).

Monograph - 2022

Resisting the Backlash: Street Protest in Italy

Donatella della Porta, Niccolò Bertuzzi, Daniela Chironi, Chiara Milan, Martín Portos & Lorenzo Zamponi
Drawing interview material, together with extensive data from the authors’ original social movement database, this book examines the development of social movements in resistance to perceived political "regression" and a growing right-wing backlash.

Journal Article - 2022

(Water) Bottles and (Street) Barricades: The Politicisation of Lifestyle-Centred Action in Youth Climate Strike Participation

Lorenzo Zamponi, Anja Corinne Baukloh, Niccolò Bertuzzi, Daniela Chironi, Donatella della Porta, Martín Portos
This article explores the forms of action adopted by participants in two Fridays For Future (FFF) strikes, focusing on the repertoires of action of (young) climate justice protesters. Drawing on protest survey data, it shows demonstrated that young protesters do not participate less in claim-based action than older cohorts. Furthermore, a process of politicisation can be seen to be unfolding that leads to increased commitment in both lifestyle and political forms of participation – at least among active milieus.

Journal Article - 2022

Performing (during) the Coronavirus crisis: The Italian populist radical right between national opposition and subnational government

Andrea Pirro
The first year of COVID-19 confirmed the standing of the populist radical right in Italy. While sitting in opposition at the national level, Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini's League shared common criticism of the Conte II government but experienced diverging trajectories in terms of popularity. These changes can be partly attributed to the different agency of their leaderships. Overall and collectively considered, the Italian populist radical right broke even during the first year of COVID-19, but the crisis exposed the first cracks in Salvini's leadership.

Monograph - 2022

Labour conflicts in the digital age

Donatella della Porta, Riccardo Emilio Chesta, Lorenzo Cini
From Deliveroo to Amazon, digital platforms have drastically transformed the way we work. But how are these transformations being received and challenged by workers? This book provides a radical interpretation of the changing nature of worker movements in the digital age, developing an invaluable approach that combines social movement studies and industrial relations. Using case studies taken from Europe and North America, it offers a comparative perspective on the mobilizing trajectories of different platform workers and their distinct organizational forms and action repertoires.

Monograph - 2021

Migrant Protest. Interactive Dynamics in Precarious Mobilizations

Elias Steinhilper
This book explores the interactions and spaces shaping the emergence, trajectory, and fragmentation of migrant protest in unfavorable contexts of marginalization.