The aim of the project is to provide archival material on women's politics in Austria adapted to online-media exigencies. Unpublished holdings covering the last three decades of women's politics are made digitally accessible, a commented selection is put online. The most crucial issues are abortion conflict, debate and information on the wage gap, family law reform, domestic violence and equal sharing of care work among others. They will be presented and made intelligible more clearly than in traditional social science presentation with authentic documents, pictures, posters, and pamphlets. Historical narratives will provide additional information and context. Visitors of the knowledge base will be able to download various items in order to use them for own activities: as teachers, students or just for their own education. Thus, we hope to establish and support a new transfer of knowledge and material between archives and people interested in the past.
The project deals with the development of family law in Austria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and their respective predecessor states during the period from 1945 to 2000 in a comparative perspective. The study focuses on the interactions between public discourse and the establishment of legal norms, whereby the following aspects are crucial: we are interested in the political actors involved in the public discussion and the legislative process. We focus both on the various actors' mode of organization and on their strategies for structuring policies. Furthermore, we are interested in the extent to which political interest groups are able to influence political deliberations and law making. At the same time, the significance of political framework conditions for the possibility of participation in public debate and in the structuring of the development of law will be elucidated. The comparison of states with different political systems and forms of society forestalls the danger of universalizing the research results. The project analyses the concepts of family and society advocated by special interest groups and reflected in codified family norms in a historical longitudinal study.
The volume provides a comprehensive and sophisticated consideration of „reproduction“, an issue which is debated very controversally and emotionally in many societies. Therefore, this book is a path-breaking contribution to the booming field of Gender Studies. The volume is organized into 14 contributions on reproductive policies in Austria, Finland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, and the US. Analyses of political strategies around child-care as well as population growth are combined for each case study in order to arrive at a more profound understanding and innovative perspectives on the complex relations between policies geared towards families, gender relations and population on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. The collection of very diverse situations and societies is complemented by an umbrella of two essays focusing the relation between gender and nation as well as the role of (post)modern reproductive medicine. Authors: Adriana Baban, Virginia Ferreira, Johanna Gehmacher, Linda Gordon, Teija Hautanen, Yelena Kulagina, Maria Mesner, Ritva Nätkin, Ann Shola Orloff, Livia Popescu, Silvia Portugal, Michele Rivkin-Fish, Aurelia Weikert und Maria Andrea Wolf.
Paul Pasteur is a professor of history at the University of Rouen and co-editor of the journal Austriaca. In his book Pasteur examines Austrian trade unions during the Austrofascist period. After having been illegalized by the authoritarian corporatist regime Socialdemocratic, Communist as well as Nationalsocialist labor organizations were forced to go into hiding. In hard competition to each other they established company organizations, in order to win over the employees, while the Austrofascists required all workers to join the Christian corporatist organizations. Paul Pasteur describes these strongly differing groups with particular focus on their fields of conflict. Whereas most studies limit their attention to one ideological group, Pasteur includes all kinds of weltanschauungen. To date there is no similar historical analysis covering Austrian trade unions in such a broad perspective. Sonja Niederacher is translating the book into German. This project is funded by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank.
The project analyzes national political options, goals, and strategies which coined economic policies at state level in Austria from 1970 to 2000 in an international context. It looks at the professional backgrounds and motivating models of the political and economic elites who were involved in policy formulation and implementation, especially in labor market and financial policy. An additional research focus concerns the main areas of media coverage and its impact on policy-makers. Thereby the research team will address questions concerning the relationship between mass media and policy-makers on the basis of empirical research results. Furthermore the project team will digitalize crucial records related to the research topic in order to make them accessible easier to the scientific community as well as to a broader public. In addition, by interviews with policy-makers of the period more information, knowledge and narratives will be recorded and put into the archives for future research.
in cooperation with the University of Skövde, Sweden The goal of this project was to analyze the bilateral relations between Austria and Sweden. One theme that was compared is the initial, separate development of the welfare state since the 1940s and 1950s. Another theme of this research project was the international comparison of the different economic and political approaches. Selected themes (such as economic relations, social policy, European integration, neutrality and security policy, cooperation with information technology, such as national rules and development initiatives with respect to the digital revolution, the effects of globalization) were illuminated and directly compared from the Austrian and Swedish viewpoints. Very different political courses and economic developments were seen especially in the current neutrality policy as well as policy relating to the European integration process. Project management: Univ. Prof. DDr. Oliver Rathkolb |