Sabine Kradolfer

A Sociological Contribution to Understanding the Use of Robots in Schools: The Thymio Robot

The Thymio II robot was designed to be used by teachers in their classrooms for a wide range of activities and at all levels of the curriculum, from very young children to the end of high school. Although the educationally oriented design of this innovative robot was successful and made it possible to distribute more than 800 Thymio robots in schools with a large majority in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, it was not sufficient to significantly raise the number of teachers using robot technology in their teaching after three years of commercialization. After an introduction and a first section on the design of this educational robot, this paper presents some results of a sociological analysis of the benefits and blockages identified by teachers in using robots, or not, with their pupils.

The Gendering of Excellence Through Quality Criteria: The case of the Swiss National Science Foundation Professorships in Switzerland

The Swiss National Science Foundation Professorships Programme is presented as a programme that aims to promote outstanding young scholars to professorial positions. Academic excellence is presented as the main selection criterion. The emphasis put on the research portfolio and on the age of the candidates means that the beneficiaries of these professorships put forward an image of excellence that is more embedded in data-based sciences, than in the humanities and social sciences, thus strengthening the domination of a sector of scientific activity essentially occupied by men over the sector that has opened up more widely to women. This paper aims to deconstruct the criteria of academic excellence as they appear in this programme, and to show that what seem to be quality criteria are inspired by a specific model. These biases tend to undermine the gender equality aims of the programme.

Gender Studies: A ‘Cheeky Knowledge’ Renormalised?

Our contribution investigates the institutionalisation process of gender studies in a Swiss French-speaking university, with a particular focus on its articulation with local social demands. The new academic governance has transformed the debates around such studies in a way that might have been expected to benefit gender studies, whose interdisciplinarity was initially seen as an undeniable advantage. Nevertheless, comparison with the changes that have occurred over the past 25 years in another interdisciplinary field of knowledge, area studies, suggests that the social resistances and new scientific objects offered by women’s/gender studies or area studies tend to be diluted under the joint influence of new social demands, fragmentation and globalisation, paving the way for new (?) academic disciplinary definitions that bring back to normal the ‘cheeky knowledge’ built by these studies.

The Politics of Identity in Latin American Censuses: Introduction to a Special Issue

This special issue is generically dedicated to social identities and censuses, yet race and ethnicity are, more concretely, the pivotal concepts around which contributors work in their respective papers. This choice is unproblematic at a nominal level: it is consistent with the terminology that census bureaus and analysts currently use to refer to social identities distinctively measured in national counts. It nevertheless deserves some additional introductory comments, since race and ethnicity are contentious socialscientific concepts. Over the past four decades there has been an exponential increase in research revolving around race and ethnicity, but this is far from translating into a consensus on the way these concepts can be defined—or even on the appropriateness of their use as analytical tools. Indeed, a central characteristic of race and ethnic studies is precisely the variety of theoretical preconceptions they embrace and the startling heterogeneity of definitions they generate. Both concepts refer to collective identities and are used to study particular ways of explaining and categorising human diversity (sameness and difference) and to discuss the social causes and consequences of this type of categorisation. Beyond that level of abstraction, finding widely shared agreements about the type of distinctive phenomena that each of these concepts name becomes much more difficult. The indeterminate use of race and ethnicity in a large share of academic literature makes them effectively appear as synonymous concepts. Those who explicitly develop definitions to conceptually distinguish them are the exception, rather than the norm. Among those who do define, race tends to be associated with forms of collective identification and with understandings of human diversity ultimately based on biological grounds and partly expressed and demarcated through idioms of phenotype, inheritance, bodily substance and genealogy. Ethnicity is in turn associated with collective identifications and understandings of diversity ultimately grounded on notions of common culture and articulated through conceptually consonant idioms in the demarcation of sameness and difference. However, this apparently neat conceptual distinction is neither clearly nor consistently reflected in the actual usage that race and ethnicity receive in academic literature—not to mention literature in other fields of cultural production. The distinction cannot be sustained either when set against ethnographic studies of social categorisation in different parts of the world. To give but an instance, analysts refer to primordial forms of ethnicity when explaining that some ‘ethnic groups’ use idioms of bodily substance and inheritance as essentialising diacritica of self-