Karin Doolan

Teaching history in a postwar social context—the case of the Croatian Danube region

This paper discusses the results of empirical research examining history teachers’ opinions on teaching recent history, and on the revocation of a moratorium on teaching former Yugoslavia’s recent history in Serbian minority schools in the Croatian Danube region. The research was conducted in 2003, involving a sample of 29 primary and secondary history teachers in both the majority and minority programmes in the two counties affected by the moratorium. The post‐war divide is evident from the differences in teachers’ opinions regarding the moratorium’s revocation and the presentation of minority history in history teaching. On a general level however, when the history of the Croats and Serbs was not discussed, most of the teachers advocated a liberal concept of history teaching.

Social inequalities in access to higher education in Croatia: five decades of resilient findings

Abstract This article provides a panoramic view of research findings on social inequalities in access to higher education in Croatia since the 1960s, guided by the question of what has changed in the findings. Our review shows that there is stark continuity over the last five decades: students from better educated family backgrounds tend to be overrepresented in higher education; students from better educated and white-collar family backgrounds are more likely to enrol in academic as opposed to professional study courses; students at one Croatian university in particular stand out in terms of their more privileged social background; and medicine seems to be the prime academic field for observing social reproduction. We note that these persistent findings run parallel to a dramatically changing political, economic and social context in Croatia, including transformations in the 1990s resulting from social ownership of the means of production to widespread private ownership, as well as transformations from a one-party political system to the establishment of a multi-party political system. The article maps possible theoretical explanations for the resilience of social inequalities in access to higher education in the context of dynamic times. It also questions the role of educational policies in this process.

Kako je rasprava o Županovljevu radu istaknula podjele u (hrvatskoj) sociologiji

In his 2004 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Michael Burawoy (2005) discussed “the division of sociological labour” among professional, policy, public and critical sociologies. He also mentioned divisions between positivist and interpretive methodologies in sociology, quantitative and qualitative techniques, as well as micro and macro sociology. Similarly, in her review of the field of sociology over the past four decades, Rosemary Crompton (2008) mentioned well-known conceptual binaries such as fact–value, agency– structure and culture–economy, noting that the “paradigm wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, which marked the culmination of these divisions, continue to haunt sociological thought. It is this notion of “binaries”, “divisions” or “paired oppositions” (Bourdieu, 1988) that I take up as an organising principle for my response to a discussion on the work of Josip Županov, a Croatian sociologist and political scientist, which took place in November 2015, co-organised by two Croatian Sociological Association’s sections Karin DOOLAN Odjel za sociologiju, Sveučilište u Zadru, Hrvatska / Department of Sociology, University of Zadar, Croatia kdoolan@unizd.hr

We Need to Change. Ideas of Growth and Development in a Time of Crisis of Fossil Energy and Capitalism

The purpose of this paper is to lay the groundwork, and provoke others to dig it up, for the holistic understanding of the economic hopes and geophysical drivers behind the themes of green economy and degrowth. It first fights for the voice in which to frame the warning of global civilizational collapse, its physical and historic drivers and experiential instantiations. The paper surveys the opinions of scholars from environmental science, biology, history, leftist social theory and economics addressing the notion that the global civilisation as we know it is facing a collapse of human societies and practices sustaining it1. Whilst there are historical narratives that evoke hope for a technological overcoming of this problem, in the text I endeavour to show how such a gamble is based on ontological confusion about the fundamental elements of the modern developmental success. The paper elucidates how the key collapse-mitigating model is not a matter of small life-style changes reliant on technological transcence of physical constraints, but a matter of serious social restructuring that would replace the missing technological fix. But for that to become democratically acceptable, the societies must renegotiate the indicators and definitions of what wellbeing consists in, whilst humanity must redefine what its endurance is to consist of, not hope for the miracle of green economy.