Academic Institutionalization Research Articles

Ciencia, mar y poder. Historia sociopolítica del Instituto Oceanográfico de Venezuela (1958-1969)

This work consists of a socio-political history of the Instituto Oceanográfico de Venezuela (IOV), a research center with which the field of Marine Sciences began its process of academic institutionalization in Venezuela. The initial decade (1958-1969) of the institute meant a start and boom of research in the Venezuelan seas, even in the context of controversies and confrontations for the control and direction of the institute, which in turn were directly influenced by the Venezuelan political climate of the time and because the IOV was also the academic center that made was possible to create the Universidad de Oriente (UDO) in 1958 in the city of Cumaná (Sucre state, Venezuela), a higher education center created in 1958 in the city of Cumaná (Sucre state, Venezuela), Venezuela), a center of higher studies created by the new political elite of the nascent Venezuelan representative democracy. The analysis was based on primary documents from the archive of Pedro Roa Morales, academic archives of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) and the UDO and the Oriente Universitario (UDO’s newspaper in the 1960s). These are letters, minutes, telegrams and manuscripts that were made available to us by Evelyn Zoppi de Roa - Pedro Roa’s widow - in 2017. As a university project that summoned scientific and political leaders, the UDO was born as a space where science converged with political- partisan practice through ideological loyalties and confrontations, features that did not take long to appear in the IOV. Thus, politicians (and politics) prevailed over scientists even in an academic institution, putting in check the project that gave rise to it.

(NE)KANONSKA ČITANJA: SAVREMENE TEORIJSKE KONTROVERZE I PROUČAVANJE ROMANA ZA DECU I MLADE U ČASOPISU DETINJSTVO (2000–2020)

The paper illuminates some aspects of the influence of the literary canon debate on the institutionalization of specific theoretical approaches in the interpretation of children’s novels. This genre, as evidenced by many thematic issues of the journal Childhood in the first de- cades of the twenty-first century, provides fertile ground for the institutional legitimization of literary theories whose postulates imply a demand for challenging or re- forming the canon, such as cultural Marxist, gender, postcolonial, and other readings that dominantly rely on the category of individual and collective identity. In this research, the role of the Childhood journal in the academic institutionalization of these methodologies is analyzed within the context of a specific paradox. The study of children’s and young adult literature has proven to be a favorable environment for non-canonical and anti-canonical readings, although the entry of these explorations into the academic framework is undeniably marked by a struggle for legitimacy and status of the subject of study. In simpler terms, while inviting to challenge the literary canon, the theory of children’s literature requested the authority for children’s and YA literature similar to that of the literary canon for adults. The aim of the paper is to describe the literary-theoretical paradigms on which the study of novels for children and young adults in the journal Childhood relies, using the major currents of literary theory on a global scale as a reference-comparative framework.

Claiming Universal Epistemic Authority – Relational Boundary Work and the Academic Institutionalization of Data Science

Abstract This article studies the rise of academic data science in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. By focusing on the boundary work that accompanies this development, we try to understand current transformations in knowledge production within digital academia and beyond. Drawing on qualitative interviews with data science scholars, we identify five lines of demarcation in claiming universal epistemic authority. This boundary work is characterized by multiple tensions and varies depending upon context and counterpart, making it inherently relational.

Asian Criminology: Its Contribution in Linking Global North and South

AbstractIn recent years, Asian criminology and Southern criminology have drawn scholarly attention to the profound divide between Western and non-Western societies, or the Global North and Global South, in criminological knowledge production. Perspectives from Asian and Southern criminology expose these divides and propose critical ways to correct the hegemony of Western over non-Western, or Northern over Southern, knowledge production. For the contemporary movement of decolonization of knowledge, a particular contribution of Asian criminology is to link Western and non-Western, or Northern and Southern, criminological science. As Sandra Walklate concluded, “Asian criminology … stands at the positive intersection of the north–south and east–west in terms of geography and culture. It is well placed to think differently, both conceptually and methodologically, about the criminological enterprise, and the debates that such different thinking might generate.” This article reviews the divide in criminology between the Global North and South. Based on the framework of the Asian criminological paradigm, Asian criminology has made major contributions to bridging the divide between the North and the South through academic institutionalization and theoretical development strategies.

Peeling the pod: towards a research agenda for podcast studies

ABSTRACT This article explores how the notion of podcast studies came about and questions its future among well-established media fields. Through a close reading of various definitions given to the term podcast in the formative years of its academic institutionalization, a first-time classification of the central traditions in podcast studies is proposed and critically discussed. This theoretical typology – whereby ‘podcast’ is understood as a technological, socio-cultural, or formalistic concept – draws attention to the complexities and limitations in justifying the very idea of studying podcasting as an autonomous media field. The critical meta-review leads to six research avenues that can make podcasting uniquely meaningful and innovative in wider contexts of media theory, such as sound studies, digital archiving, and everyday studies.

Нарратив об Отцах-основателях в национальной памяти США

The article is devoted to the narrative-constructivist analysis of the historical memory of the Founding Fathers in the USA. To achieve this goal, specific research tasks were performed in the article. First, the nation was conceptualized as a ‘narrative community’ constructed by certain narratives about the people, their culture, past, present and future. Secondly, the differences between historical knowledge (knowledge obtained using the methods of historical research) and historical memory (a collective representation of the past that reflects the value-normative conventions in society) were identified. Thirdly, the place, content, and functions of the historical narrative of the Founding Fathers in the US national memory were determined. Specifically, this narrative reflects the universal, archetypal mythologem of the “golden generation”, which is present in a variety of national cultures. It performs the functions of legitimizing and relativizing the social order (by creating a connection with the glorified past and, at the same time, breaking with it), as well as the function of regulating the behavior of individuals (by creating a model of civic virtue). Fourth, a connection was found between the national style of social narration and the Protestant tradition, which is the basis of the US civil religion. The author defends the idea that this connection predetermined the “religious style” of the national narration in the United States. Fifthly, the national narrative of the Founding Fathers was considered in the context of historical revisionism, which today is called upon to restore historical justice through demythologization of the national past. The premises of this historical revisionism were also identified: the academic institutionalization of new disciplines in the 1960s (e.g. women’s history, black history, etc.). This helped determine the current dynamics and ideological orientation of narrative practices in American society.

Le Médiévisme érudit en France: de la Révolution au Second Empire. Édité par Fanny Maillet et Alain Corbellari

Literary and artistic manifestations of the Romantic ‘goût du Moyen Âge’ (p. 1) are well-known features of the cultural landscape of early nineteenth-century France. Similarly, nineteenth-century academic medievalism is a familiar presence in studies of the construction of national identity during the Troisième République. The history of the transformation of the earlier, Romantic medievalism of figures like Victor Hugo or Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc, into the later, scholarly medievalism of romance philologists such as Gaston Paris and Joseph Bédier, however, remains a ‘nébuleuse encore relativement mal cartographiée’ (p. 10). Of course, the gradual institutionalization of medievalism in nineteenth-century France has long been acknowledged in general terms as a prolonged response to the upheavals of the revolutionary period. However, little attention has been paid to date to pioneering activity in French medieval studies which preceded the formation of the École nationale des chartes (est. 1821, reformed in 1846) and the academic institutionalization of history as a social science in the École pratique des hautes études (est. 1868). Nor has sufficient work been done to bridge the divide between the antiquarian erudition of the Ancien Régime (epitomized in the works of figures such as Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye) and the medievalisms of the nineteenth century. It is in the work of little-known figures such as the Breton historian and anthologist Louise de Kéralio (1758–1822, studied in a contribution to this volume by Bernard Ribémont), for example, that scholarship connects the medievalism of Enlightenment érudits with the world of nineteenth-century literary history. Other chapters bring to light marginalized figures whose work was essential to the flowering of medieval studies: the pioneering scholar of medieval Latin, Édélestand Du Méril (1801–1870; presented by Jean-Yves Tilliette), who saw in medieval French poetry an expression of the Romantic Volksgeist; Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué (1815–1895; in a chapter by Hélène Bouget), one of the founders of modern Celtic literary studies; or Étienne-Jean Delécluze (1781–1863; see the contribution by Alain Corbellari), the polymath scholar, painter, translator, and historian of chivalry. Further chapters provide more thematic contributions. Patricia Victorin, for example, studies the Romantic reception of Jean Froissart and the influence of his Chroniques on nineteenth-century historians and historical-novelists. Jonathan Hofer, meanwhile, tracing the editorial fate of Old French fabliaux in the first decades of the century, shows how this corpus of jocular récits gave a foundation to the myth of a ‘Moyen Âge populaire’, crude yet vibrant. The construction of a medieval imagination among the reading public is further explored by Guillaume Cousin, who focuses on the role played by literary journals under the July Monarchy. Far from constituting an exhaustive treatment of the subject, as the editors are the first to confess (p. 13), this volume is nevertheless a groundbreaking collection. Indeed, very little else by way of recent scholarship is available to students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature who may be eager, when faced with instances of medievalism, to locate them in a wider intellectual context.

La División de Estudios de Posgrado ante la COVID-19: una mirada retrospectiva al 2020

The essay presents a review of the pandemic situation in the Division of Postgraduate Studies (DEP) at the Faculty of Medicine of UNAM during 2020. The intention is to reflect on the institutional response capacity, reconstructing the actions and events that show rhythms and orientations in three moments. In the first stage, concerns and efforts were aimed at protecting residents from the imminence of the risk of contagion and death. The DEP intensified relations with health institutions, and campaigns were carried out to give them the necessary tools for their protection. The second tram was for recomposition to reasume educational activities and pay attention to the training processes at each specialty. Finally, in the third period, that of the new normality, educational processes mediated by communication and information technologies were assumed, although clinical practice continued in face-to-face mode. As hospitals have returned to their pre-COVID dynamics, educational activities have also tended to re-establish. The COVID-19 contingency acted as an accelerator of change and the DEP was not indifferent to that process. Despite the mistakes and errors, some of the characteristics of academic institutionalization were transformed, promoting educational shifts.

Avant-garde against institutionalization: “China’s university revolution” during Great Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) from the perspective of Tel Quel intellectuals

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of the May 68 Movement throughout France and the Great Cultural Revolution sweeping China, the avant-garde of Tel Quel pinned their hopes of fighting against academic institutionalization in France on ‘‘China’s university revolution.” Tel Quel avant-garde once believed that China’s “open-door university” movement had not only successfully “burned down” the university institution, but also created the vanguard culture of the proletariat. Their imagination of “China’s university revolution" is helpful to the impact on the rigid system of French universities and the creation of French vanguard culture. However, after visiting China, they did not find the expected revolutionary vanguard culture in Chinese universities, but completely bankrupted their own cultural politics. The experience of Tel Quel avant-garde made us reflect on the role of intellectuals, and also encouraged us to discuss how to get rid of the dichotomy between the “universal intellectuals" and the academic institution established in the Enlightenment era. The Foucauldian "specific intellectuals" inspired us that intellectuals should criticize reality based on their professional knowledge and construct reasonable university institution according to the actual situation.

Structure of field in anthropological studies in Chile. Exploration of scientific production in Chilean specialist journals during the period of academic institutionalization (1954-1973)

This study assesses anthropological production in Chile during a period which we identify as that of the field’s academic institutionalization (1954- 1973), and which saw the creation of the country’s first university departments and educational programs dedicated to the anthropological sciences. This research focuses on scientific works published in specialist journals in Chile. Use of content analysis and descriptive statistical techniques enabled us to determine the volume of production, establish the areas of knowledge covered, and identify the thematic tendencies and actors that contributed to the development of the discipline. This allowed us to establish a background upon which to base a description of the socio-institutional context in which research and knowledge production took place, as well as to define the morphology of the field and to identify the cognitive dynamics that distinguish the period. Findings suggest that anthropological studies in Chile are in line with the global tendency toward specialization in disciplinary areas, giving rise to an anthropology of adjectives or fission (Stocking 2002) and demonstrating the decline of the integral science model with its clear interdisciplinary tendency or vocation.

Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century

Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century Stephanie M. Hilger The academic separation of the sciences and the humanities makes it difficult to explore the connection between the various aspects of the human condition, not least in the discipline of medicine. Even though medicine is not a hard science per se but an interpretive approach that combines scientific and humanities-based modes of knowledge and therefore also experiences what Catherine Belling has called the "hermeneutic anxiety" that informs humanities research,1 it is firmly located among other science buildings whose literal and figurative gates are jealously guarded. The current academic focus on evidence-based medicine further increases the distance between medicine and humanities-based approaches to the human body by implying that the humanities do not produce real evidence. At the same time, calls for narrowing this distance are intensifying. Reestablishing the connection between the humanities and the sciences has become more important than ever because of global processes of corporatization that affect both health care institutions and universities. Cost efficiency in medical education has made it increasingly difficult to offer courses that focus on the human aspect of medicine within the medical curriculum itself. At the same time, the perceived crisis in the humanities has encouraged literary scholars to emphasize that their work is not a self-referential field of inquiry but that it engages broad social and political processes. As a result of the convergence of these two trends, the need for interdisciplinary spaces in teaching and research has grown over the past years. The most forceful calls for bridging disciplinary divides already occurred in the 1970s, when the practice of "literature and medicine" gained ground as a reaction to the transformation of medical schools into high-powered research centers in the previous decade. As Anne Hudson Jones outlines, Edmund Pellegrino called upon medical educators to refocus their attention on the moral dimension of medicine.2 At the same time, Joanne Trautmann Banks highlighted the necessity of "read[ing], in the fullest sense" in order to increase medical practitioners' "tolerance for ambiguity" with the goal of improving patient care.3 With the establishment of the journal Literature and Medicine in 1982, these interdisciplinary endeavors found a home. The name of the journal reflected the reality that the majority of these interdisciplinary ventures originated in literature departments. In addition, literature, in the sense of belles lettres, is perhaps the most "humanistic" of all [End Page 301] humanities disciplines because it is often considered a production of art for art's sake. However, the contributors to the first issues of the journal demonstrated the exact opposite of this common notion. In fact, Rita Charon vehemently opposed an instrumentalization of literature that provided medical doctors merely with "a civilizing veneer" by arguing that writing a poem or quoting a philosopher does not necessarily make a better doctor.4 Many of the early scholars working in the field focused on the textual features not only of literature but also of other types of discourse, including medical texts. One incarnation of this practice is Rita Charon's concept of "narrative medicine," which puts medical practitioners face to face with the textuality of their patients' experiences. These close reading practices were geared at simultaneously uncovering the textual dimension of medical discourse and demonstrating that literature does not constitute a self-referential aesthetic discourse but a powerful vehicle for social commentary. Gradually, the designation "literature and medicine" became limiting in view of other humanities-based approaches to medicine such as history, philosophy, and theology, which do not necessarily focus on medicine's narrative dimension. As a result, the designation "medical humanities" began to be used with increasing frequency. The founding of journals such as Medical Humanities, published by the Institute of Medical Ethics in the UK (2000), and the Journal of Medical Humanities, based in the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado (1981),5 signaled the expansion of the field and its increasing academic institutionalization. More recently, as Paul Crawford has observed, "medical humanities" has been replaced by "health humanities" to encompass not only the full range of disciplines involved in the delivery of healthcare but also the patients themselves.6...

A encruzilhada da abordagem cultural na Geografia

O artigo propõe uma exposição sobre a abordagem cultural na Geografia desde a institucionalização acadêmica da disciplina, partindo do pressuposto que as abordagens não podem ser entendidas como saberes isolados e fragmentados. Neste trabalho, correntes da Geografia são definidas como rótulos que possuem serventia didática, mas que não dão conta de dimensionar e caracterizar as estruturas híbridas do pensamento. O artigo defende assim a ideia de que as abordagens culturais são híbridas, não havendo um tipo ideal, ainda que o determinismo ambiental tenha sido praticamente banido da academia, sobrevivendo em certos recônditos do senso comum. Por intermédio de sua exposição o artigo contempla alguns dos principais conflitos e dilemas da abordagem cultural dos últimos 150 anos.

INSTITUTIONAL ASPECTS OF SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL ACTIVITY

The article examines the problem of institutional aspects of the activities of scientific schools. The methodological basis of the study includes the ideas of the evolutionary theory of social institutions. Dialectical and causal methods are the main methods of analysis. The article demonstrates the role of institutions in the process of formation, decline and revival of the school on the example of the Austrian school of economics. The development of the school took place in accordance with the institutional requirements that existed at that time, the school reached the rare case of four to five generations of “teacher-pupil”. The loss of the institutional academic environment after the Anschluss of Austria is interpreted as the most important factor leading to decline. The process of the school revival is analyzed in the context of the used scientific institutions (conferences, research centers, scientific journals). The theoretical and practical value of the paper is to confirm the thesis that the transformation of scientific schools into invisible colleges that do not require geographical localization, in the case of a school revival, has its own specifics. In our opinion, the work of scientists in different scientific centers with joint distance communication initially requires the concentration of a “critical mass” around one of them. For the Austrian school, the Mises Institute acted as such a center. In addition, the fruitful functioning of a scientific school requires the task of preparing new scientists, which cannot be without academic institutionalization, i.e. opening the master's and doctoral programs.

Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries ed. by Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders

Reviewed by: Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries ed. by Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders Joanny Moulin (bio) Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, editors De Gruyter, 2017, viii + 288 pp. ISBN 9783110501612, $34.95 paperback. This book is an English edition, revised and augmented, of Theorie der Biographie: Grundlagentexte und Kommentar edited by Wilhelm Hemecker and Bernhard Fetz (De Gruyter, 2011). Out of the forty-one articles it contains, twenty-six (63%) were in the first anthology in German, of which thirteen have been discarded, while nineteen new texts (46%) have been added in. The principle of composition consists in offering an abundant selection of essential contributions to the theory of biography since the eighteenth century, predominantly issued from the European tradition, with each text coupled with an article by one or several researchers of the Ludwig Boltzman Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Biographie (Ludwig Boltzman Institute for the History and Theory of Biography), founded in Vienna in 2005. The rationale for the game of musical chairs that has eliminated such authors as André Maurois, Emil Ludwig, Michel Foucault, Leo Löwenthal, Wolfgang Hildssheimer, and Anne-Kathrin Reulecke, to usher in Marcel Proust, Boris Tomashevsky, Roland Barthes, James Clifford, Carolyn Steedman, and Gillian Beer is not self-evident, but may simply be explained by circumstantial necessities. Be it as it may, it is regrettable the decision was not made to keep them all on board, even at the cost of reducing the length of the commentaries if such was the diktat of the law of the market, for the whole collection is so interesting and well-made that making it longer would have been better. The work is intended as a textbook for students of biography properly speaking—that is to say considered as a distinct genre, no longer subsuming it under the umbrella of life writing, which also includes autobiography and memoir in all their forms. In this respect, this book does an immense service to the slowly emerging research field of biography studies, for at least three excellent reasons. First, by focusing on biography in the strict sense as a specific object of research, it liberates it from the epistemological quicksand in which it has too long remained stilted. Second, it provides us with a robust tool for the teaching of biography studies that [End Page 818] will do much to ensure the development of its academic institutionalization. Third, it is all the more efficient for being written in English—and incidentally, Johann Gottfried Herder’s “Fifth Letter on the Furtherance of Humanity” (1793) and Stefan Zweig’s “History as a Poetess” (1943) appear here in English translation for the first time—and therefore it may easily become an international course book. But furthermore, it reinforces the worldwide dissemination of the achievements of the researchers of the Viennese institute, of which it does more than adumbrate a sample state of the art. It also raises the hope that their two major contributions to the field, Die Biographie: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte by Wilhelm Hemecker and Die Biographie: Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie by Bernhard Fetz, will soon be translated into English as well. In his introduction, Edward Saunders explains that the title Biography in Theory, rather than “Theory of Biography” (Theorie der Biographie), is meant to “invite a more open, and altogether more sceptical, discussion” (1). This is a rhetorical precaution against a biting northwesterly anti-theory wind that has for some time chilled the literary zeitgeist. He pays lip service to writers like Ray Monk, the peremptory author of “Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding,” who prefers “to see biography as an exemplar of Wittgenstein’s notion of the ‘understanding that consists in seeing connections’” (258), but paradoxically speaks as if such a statement was not a very insightful contribution to the theory of biography. For there is in fact a misunderstanding of what we understand by “theory,” because of a very transitory historical phenomenon by which, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, “Theory” exerted a temporary hegemony over literary science, of which it must nevertheless be an indispensable component, as...

ENTREVISTA A MARY NASH

Mary Nash fue una de las primeras historiadoras que, en un contexto ciertamente adverso para ello, afirmó y mostró que las mujeres también habían sido protagonistas del pasado. Además de impulsar el proceso de institucionalización académica de este ámbito de investigación histórica, acercó a las historiadoras españolas los debates historiográficos feministas y abrió líneas de investigación centrales en la historia de las mujeres y género para la España contemporánea: mujeres y anarquismo, mujeres y movimiento obrero, feminismo histórico, las mujeres en la Guerra Civil, mujeres, colonialismo y postcolonialidad, mujeres, género y Transición a la democracia.

Long-term and decentred trajectories of doing history from a global perspective: institutionalization, postcolonial critique, and empiricist approaches, before and after the 1970s

AbstractNotions of the ‘global’ in historiography have a long tradition, and yet they appear to be a novelty. This article shows how older understandings of world history, imbued with Eurocentric presuppositions and universalist metaphysical reasoning, were questioned and revised in a long-term process. Recent criticism of Eurocentrism, linked with postcolonial scholarship, and the development of source-based approaches to study global connections and comparisons are usually recognized as innovations that took shape since the 1970s. In fact, they are rooted in profound conceptual revisions and academic institutionalization, which began much earlier. Based on the development of the field of world history in the United States, this article argues that concepts for a multipolar, interactive, and transcultural history developed from a dialectical and critical move away from older narratives. Historians and area specialists have wrestled for at least half a century with questions and problems that were rediscovered in the global turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, the example shows that the field developed in specific trajectories, reflecting local and national institutional academic circumstances, as well as specific socio-political contexts.

Entrepreneurial narratives and concept teaching and learning

Entrepreneurship education (EE) is facing a tension between practical valence and academic institutionalization. As a consequence, we know very little about how story-based pedagogy is implemented in the classroom, though various entrepreneurial narratives have been institutionalized into EE programs. This article examines how one Chinese teacher thematically constructs six nascent entrepreneurs to illustrate the concept of entrepreneurship in a classroom setting. The findings suggest that the entrepreneurial narratives used by the teacher are different in structure from those reported by entrepreneurship studies, because entrepreneurial stories narrated by teachers are non-participant life stories. This article argues that narrative is an important tool for teachers to personalize their conceptualization of entrepreneurship. Such conceptualization, embedded in both the structure and the content of narratives, facilitates entrepreneurial teaching and learning in a holistic, instantiated, and impactful way. The article also demonstrates that teachers can create additional learning opportunities, by resorting to specific narrative features and thematic construction. It concludes with critical reflections on entrepreneurial narrative, story-based pedagogy, and EE research and calls for more classroom-based research in the field.

A identidade disciplinar de Gilberto Freyre e a institucionalização acadêmica da antropologia no Brasil

O processo de institucionalização do ensino de antropologia no Brasil inicia-se na década de 1930, quando são criados os primeiros cursos de ciências sociais, e com eles as primeiras cátedras em Antropologia no ensino superior. Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), ainda que mais reconhecido pela sua vasta e relevante obra acadêmica, engajou-se também nesse processo, com destaque para sua atuação como professor na Universidade do Distrito Federal. Busco, neste artigo, analisar a atuação de Freyre como professor de Antropologia, almejando captar as direções que esta disciplina assume com ele. Para a realização deste trabalho, parto da base empírica de suas aulas taquigrafadas, as articulando continuamente com seus dados biográficos e com seu legado acadêmico.

Professionalization, precarity and the Greek labour market: revisiting professional sociology in the period following the financial crisis

ABSTRACTSociologists and social scientists’ low professional status looms large when looking at the rapidly changing professional hierarchy based on the prominent role of technology and of scientific applications for peoples’ lives. The paper seeks to unveil the inadequate professionalization of sociology in Greece and to relate this situation to the increase in the employment precariousness of sociologists over the years of the economic crisis. Moreover, the dominant economy-centric ideological/ governance model which promotes the ‘utilitarianism’ of the social sciences has played a significant role in sociology's residual position. The paper is structured along three axes: First of all, the low professional status of sociologists is related to the delayed academic institutionalization of sociology. Secondly, there is brief discussion of the relevant literature on graduate supply and demand in the labour market and the expansion of higher education. Thirdly, a more focused discussion is developed which portrays the opportunities and challenges faced by sociologists and other social scientists in the labour market, giving particular emphasis to the current situation in the wake of the financial crisis. Finally, it is concluded that the vicious circle of low professionalization and high precariousness facing sociologists demands institutional action aimed at reformulating the public agenda.

Institutionalization, neo-politicization and the politics of defining Sámi research

ABSTRACTThis article critically examines recent changes in the social terrain of Sámi research in Finland, where the research field is subject to a new wave of academic institutionalization, and where questions regarding “Sáminess” have become particularly prominent. The article argues that in this conjuncture of institutionalization and neo-politicization, definitions of Sámi research which emphasize its political and ethical qualities (“Sámi research” as research done from a “Sámi perspective” or “taking it into account”) appear increasingly problematic and can actually end up doing the opposite of what was originally intended. Instead of bringing questions regarding the politics of perspective, location, representation and power/knowledge to the fore, presenting the research field in these terms might turn attention away from a variety of interests and political desires that currently are projected onto Sámi research, and hence depoliticize understandings of Sámi research and its complex interdependence with the state and society.