Abstract
Whereas political science has a long history in the higher-education provision of many countries, it was only in the early 1970s that it became a feature of the provision in Austria. Not only is Austria a latecomer to the political science profession, but it is also home to a rather small political science community with there only being three universities which have established political science departments: Innsbruck, Salzburg and Vienna. Today two university political science departments have mainstreamed gender into their curriculum, with this being the result of the success of feminist entrepreneurs in these departments. The provision at the University of Vienna is typified by one where professors, associates and external lecturers contribute to the curriculum in gender political science. This state of affairs is, however, far from secure as the Bologna process, the transformation toward an entrepreneurial university as well as budget cuts challenge these institutionalizations. This article seeks to explain this mixed picture through an analysis of the recent state of the art of teaching and gender research in Austrian political science before proceeding to point out the favorable factors which fostered the establishment of gender studies in Political Science. Finally, the article builds on the recent challenging conditions which jeopardizes gender studies within the discipline.
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Notes
The German language has a female and male gender, such as for instance ‘Professor’ (m) and ‘Professorin’ (f). A solution to visualize the two genders in written documents is the so-called ‘Binnen-I’, that is, ‘ProfessorIn’. The letter was published in the Austrian daily ‘Die Presse’, available at http://diepresse.com/files/pdf/Offener_Brief_Heinisch-Hosek_Mitterlehner.pdf, accessed 20 December 2014.
A search on LexisNexis University (1 June 2010–26 June 2015) gives a brief picture of the debates in two Austrian quality press daily newspapers, Der Standard (liberal) and Die Presse (conservative): The keyword ‘Genderismus’ (this is the pejorative expression for Gender Studies and Gender Mainstreaming) showed five articles in ‘Die Presse’ and none in ‘Der Standard’, for the keyword ‘Gender Ideology’ fourteen articles in ‘Die Presse’ and three articles in ‘Der Standard’ were found and the keyword ‘gendered language’ had fifteen articles in ‘Die Presse and two articles in ‘Der Standard’. Similar results are found in the study ‘Frauenpolitik und Medien’ (2015), which analyzed ‘Der Standard’, ‘Die Presse’ and ‘Der Kurier’.
For the composition of staff at the sociology department at the University of Vienna please visit: https://www.soz.univie.ac.at/personen/mitarbeiterinnen-am-institut-fuer-soziologie, accessed 20 December 2014.
In 2015, four political science professors were teaching women’s and gender studies at Austrian universities; two at the University of Innsbruck, one in Linz at the Social Science faculty and one at the University of Vienna. Three of the professorships have special denominations with reference either to women’s, gender or diversity studies.
For more information on the network visit: https://genderandagency.univie.ac.at/, accessed 30 August 2014.
For the gender mainstreaming strategy of the FWF visit: https://www.fwf.ac.at/de/ueber-den-fwf/gender-mainstreaming/fix-the-institutions/detailseite/, accessed 20 December 2014.
Only three out of the four departments have a study program: the Departments of Political Science at the University of Innsbruck, Salzburg and Vienna. The department of Goverment at the University of Vienna has no separate study program.
Austrian Universities have teaching traditions, which differ from the United Kingdom and the United States tradition. Even the content of introductory classes and lectures are open to the thematic priorities of the teacher. Furthermore, universities do not have a textbook tradition (for the United States example see Cassese and Bos, 2013). Therefore each lecturer designs his/her course according to his/her thematic priorities. This is legitimized with the constitutional right to freedom of research and teaching (Art. 17 of the Austrian constitution ‘Die Wissenschaft und ihre Lehre ist frei’.). Therefore the concept of mainstreaming is not really applicable to the Austrian case (Lyle-Gonga, 2013; Atchison, 2013).
See for similar experience Dahlerup (2010) and Childs and Krook (2006: 20).
No systematic research on the Austrian women’s movement and its recent foci of mobilization exists. Hence, it is difficult to prove evidence for this general impression.
While the first generation of professors understood themselves as ‘feminists’ or as women’s studies scholars, today denominations include gender or diversity studies.
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sauer, b. austrian exceptionalism? insights from a huge department in a small country. Eur Polit Sci 15, 332–342 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2015.81
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2015.81