Ioana Cîrstocea

Les restructurations de l’enseignement supérieur en Roumanie après 1990. Apprentissage international de la gestion, professionnalisation de l’expertise et politisation de l’enjeu universitaire

Growing enrolment rates figures, newly established universities, changes of the legal frame and of the institutional configuration illustrate the transformation of the Romanian higher education system since 1990. Although the chronology, the aims and the modalities of these transformations have been described in a wide body of literature belonging mainly to the reformers themselves, the later are a blind spot in the existing scholarship. To make up for this, attention is turned to the social conditions and processes underlying the reforms and to the reformers networks themselves (their professional, institutional, and personal itineraries). Light is thus shed on a national case with strong connections to the “academic globalization” advocated by the World Bank, UNESCO and the EU. By taking into account the international dimension of higher education reform processes, a contribution is made to the existing literature on the transformation of the public sector not only in Romania but in Eastern Europe in general.

Eléments pour une sociologie des études féministes en Europe centrale et orientale

Womens/gender studies were established in the Eastern European post-communist countries during the 1990s, as a new field of academic research and higher education. Works produced in this framework are often used as expert studies and aim to contribute to the improvement of the condition of women in that region, being at the core of the social and political reconstitution programs during the post-communist era. They were established by agents who were simultaneously active in different social spheres (scientific space, civil society associations, or institutionalized politics) and who exemplarily personify the multisituated feminism of the globalization era. These studies criss-cross national and international levels as well as scientific and militant logics. Hence they seem a pertinent entry to study the reconstruction of social sciences, the emergence of new academic topics, the international circulation and the importation of scientific questions and, finally, the recomposition of the academic elites within the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The article begins with a general point about the East-European context of the 1990s, when the socio-economic degradation of womens condition met a widely-spread rejection of feminist ideas due to their ideological manipulation by the socialist regimes. Then a zoom on the Romanian case allows us a reflection on the construction of the ‘womens issue’ during the post-communist transition, when several types of agents involved in the democratization reforms make theirs the transnational concern for womens rights. Finally, on the basis of these preliminary ideas, some research axes and working hypotheses are presented, such as: the sociology of gender studies as a new academic discipline, in a perspective inspired by the social history of social sciences; the sociology of the international circulation of feminist ideas and of the dynamics of East–West intellectual debates on the topic of womens condition in the post-communist countries; the analysis of the multiplying bureaucratic uses of ‘gender’ consequences.