La crise des sciences sociales en Europe - un exemple italien

La Gauche en Italie vient de perdre la Sardaigne et s'effondre littéralement. Les sciences sociales par ailleurs s'y portent fort mal. Voici ce qu'une mienne correspondante vient de m'écrire. Je pense que son cas en illustre bien d'autres. Et l'Italie n'est pas la seule concernée. Le syndrôme touche toute l'Europe

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I got my PhD in anthropology last year with a research on the ways transatlantic slave trade and the history of the colonial Empire of a Northern Europe country has been represented in its museums. Now I'm desperately unemployed, but I'm trying to work with migrants and migration issues here in Italy, because I feel it is a really dark dark moment for this country, in which every single political problem seems to be connected to a "dark other" there to blame.

I'm preparing a proposal for a post-doc which should focus on Italian removal of its imperial past as one of the causes of its schizophrenic attitude towards migrants, especially those coming form the Horn. But I don't now if I will ever find a funding for this research, especially at the moment!!!

I'm publishing a book from my PhD dissertation with a little French publisher that has an anten in Italy, at my own expenses... actually I decided to publish with them for a very sad reason:

I need the book published, but all the editors here ask the authors to buy a certain number of copies at their own expenses, if they are new authors and after a survey, I chose them because they are the cheapest!

Still I'll have to buy 90 copies of the book once it's published which is going to cost me around 2000 euros!

But I need it for the applications for fellowships, at the moment my publications are very few, I need to increase their number

Beside, I'm not planning to go back to the northern country and continue that research, so I need to consider it "closed"

And I have no hope to interest an Italian publisher in what happens in northern Europe museums on slave trade and empire

Here in Italy we face a TOTAL removal of colonial legacies: most people don't genuinely know we actually had colonies

That's why I would like to work on that issues from now on, but it's hard, no one seems eager to approve that, I mean, no one with money of course.

I'm trying to interest museums on my project, but they still look much more interested in displaying African masks and arrows without any connection with their history than anything else.