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This chapter deals with the perception of (sensed) discrimination and the coping strategies of Russian-speaking female scholars in Germany and applies an intersectional approach between culture, migration, gender and social background. Based on telephone interviews, the study aims to contribute to the discussion on discrimination in research environments and individuals’ professional integration by exploring narratives of migration and work in 13 women who migrated from the former Soviet Union (FSU) to Germany from 1990s to 2010s. Based on the findings, the author derives implications for policy and practice, such as a recommendation to implement introductory conversations with newcomers to reduce culture clash in competitive work contexts.

The purpose of this study/paper Manipulating Golden Wombs’ (2017) is to show the author’s non-site intervention of authoritarian – undemocratic maneuvering of both women’s and earth’s “golden” wombs. The burning fossil fuels in myriads of flame colors, signal the power and distress of Earth’s wounded womb, memories of war, environmental destruction and human fatality, and descend to decline as extinguished Oil Drops (2017), creating a void. Global warming poses a problem for fossil fuel systems and those who profit from them.

The title of this paper has been inspired by Cara New Dagget’s book, The Birth of Energy (2019), posited in the nascent realm of energy “mortalities.” Now, confronting a world warmed by sweltering fossil fuels, the book provides us with a direction to thinking energy beyond the “Calvinist view” of everlasting work. Spellbound by Manipulating Golden Wombs’ (2017), the audience canter around the outer surface of the centrally positioned, circulating luminous “acrylic” oil drops highlighted by hundreds of mono-frequency lamps impregnated with desert biodiversity. A closer look takes spectators through a fiery desert, across the fossil fuel fields into the depths of its scorching oil wells, its womb, as they sense the “real-time” catastrophe that had occurred beyond the gallery wall.

These artists’ objective with their interventions is to “root it to the contour of the […] land, so that it’s permanently there and subject to the weathering,” so the audience is “sort of curious to see what will happen to this” (Schmidt, 1996, 225) through the course of time. The works resists the resistance of nature and social culture, as well as of body and intellect by emphasizing the intransience, however complex, of human beings with the ecosphere in which they survive (Novak 2002, 23). The surfacing of the under-surface of the land and ocean life triggers the idea of the private space, which involves role-play, gender norms and the control over women's lives in the capitalist and Gulf societies. Authoritarianism, fossil fuel capital, high-energy use and militarism make the climate politics critical to planetary security. This combustible convergence gave birth to Manipulating Golden Wombs’ (2017).

Ganz reminds us that devouring less energy appears to be almost unharmonious with the current politics of being “Modern.” Sacrificing energy resonances with abstinence at best, and widespread death and injustice at worst. But, consuming an overload of energy is incompatible with a multispecies existence on Earth. Scientists caution “a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway,” the consequence of which could be an uninhabitable, unsafe globe for beings (Steffen et al., 2018). Even though it sounds vivid, it is hard to overstate the crisis in the midst of what environmentalists and biologists term as a sixth extinction event (Kolbert, 2014), in line with a “biological annihilation” that paints “a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life” (Ceballos et al., 2017).

It is not only the land’s womb that we have hurt; we have miffed the hearts of the water network, and “Othered” and the wombs of many women and most surfaces of the Earth have been penetrated, unconsented! To sustain a biodiverse sphere, to pause the deaths of the planet’s flora and fauna and to thrive on Earth, we need to work on renewable sources of energy based on “new collectively shared values, principles, and frameworks” (Steffen et al., 2018). We need to stop Manipulating Golden Wombs’ (2017). Are we ready to accept the challenge? (Lau and Traulsen, 2016)

Petro-masculinity has multiple global dimensions and manifests in multiple and locally specific ways (Dagget, 2018). This encourages the geographically diverse artists discussed in this paper to embrace alternative visions, to make bold and explicit statements on gender and global diversity, equity and rights. Through history, women, in specific, embodied the entirety of the Ecocene and its life cycle and explored it in the context of their own relationships, health, sexuality, fertility, reproduction, childbirth, illness and inescapably death. The artists’ interventions’ visual physiognomies and intentions point toward a comprehensive agenda of action that leads to remedial courses toward reinstating the biome to a healthy condition.

Manipulating Golden Wombs’ (2017) enacts the historic all-consuming fires, penetrating the “shared environment,” burning the fossilized fuels exuding from Earth’s penetrated womb. The higher cone-shaped oil drops irradiate the intense dazzling images of oil wells in flames and the desert flora and fauna nestled within the scorching inner arena. This aligns with the private space provided to women. The wombs are smothered in the fuming fires of the Gulf war. The darker, narrower lower oil drops, iconic of the remnants of fossil fuel, are the residual sludge within which the land and water species are enmeshed and ensnared to death. The potency of the enactment of the drops “enables the viewer to see [him/]herself seeing, to become aware of how she perceives the world around [him/]her and in doing so participates in shaping it” (Eliasson, 2009, p. 25) as a form of engagement, which involves an “attention to time, movement and changeability” (pp. 18–21).

Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) is home to 21% of the world’s population of people who inject drugs and it is the region with the fastest-growing HIV epidemic. HIV prevalence among women who inject drugs is significantly higher than among men in EECA. Even in places with high coverage of needle syringe programmes and HIV testing and treatment, women’s access to opioid substitution treatment is lower than men, and women’s sexual and reproductive health needs remain unaddressed. EECA has a unique system of drug registries that store the personal data of people who use drugs. Registration lowers the chances of employment and access to education and for women and increases the risk of losing custody of their children. The system of drug registries contributes to drug-related stigma. Breaches of confidentiality of drug registry data lead to the further marginalisation of women who use drugs. Criminalisation, past experience of police violence and poverty contribute to healthcare access barriers for women. There is a need for legislative changes to improve personal data protection, decriminalise drug use and reduce police violence. The positive effects of these changes would only be seen in the long term. In the interim, women need special access programmes that are designed specifically to address their needs, that provide free-of-charge services and that ensure the safety and confidentiality of personal data.

Recent years have seen the development of new approaches to the study of gender and sexuality in childhood, with attention given to socio-historical, cultural and political contexts. This chapter aims to contribute towards a limited field of research on queer childhood and youth in Central Asia by considering how narratives of queer childhood in Kazakhstan are culturally produced. This chapter draws on the material from in-depth interviews of 11 queer people living in Kazakhstan, focussing on their narratives of childhood. The study exposes the effect of silence about non-heteronormative identities in Kazakhstan on queer children. Narratives of bullying and managing school violence are explored along with narratives of queer childhood within the families of origin. Lastly, the chapter foregrounds instances of agency and resilience, considering how queer children manage to steer themselves away from being an ‘impossible subject’ and contest dominant societal attitudes and discourses.

The purpose of this paper is to address notions and practices relating to work–life balance for native German scholars and researchers who have migrated from the former Soviet Union (FSU). Issues will be explored from a cultural perspective, identifying culturally based interpretations of work–life balance.

Foregrounded in a diversity approach, this empirical study draws upon explorative interviews to discuss work–life balance in German academia. To overcome monocultural observations, 25 German scholars and 11 researchers originating from the FSU were interviewed, all of whom are highly skilled female scholars.

Findings demonstrate that individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds can perceive huge differences in identical working conditions. The study links meanings of work–life balance with individual practices and identifies key components of work–life balance within this population. It also discusses the decisions that scholars make about starting families or remaining childless for the sake of their careers.

This study is the first of its kind in Germany, and represents a strong implication for policies and their evaluation. It identifies the crucial role played by culturally rooted notions relating to work–life balance practices.

This study aims to answer two research questions: first, to what extent can workplace bullying be explained by ageism? And second, does the likelihood of workplace bullying increase when age interacts with gender and ethnic minority?

The authors report results from a survey carried out in 11 organizations in Estonia (N = 1,614) using the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (Einarsen et al., 2009).

The results show that ageism does not explain bullying in Estonia. As in some earlier studies, older age correlates negatively with negative acts, and women report less work-related bullying than men. These findings were unexpected because Estonia's post-socialist background and the highest gender wage gap in Europe suggested otherwise. However, there is gendered ageism in work-related bullying such that older women report more negative acts in their workplace. Respondents from ethnic minority groups do not experience more bullying in general, nor in combination with age. Surprisingly, managers reported both person- and work-related bullying more than employees with no subordinates.

The study contributes to intersectionality literature with a view to workplace bullying in post-socialist study context.

During the last three decades or so, the introduction of gender studies into higher education in Romania as a field of teaching and research has proved to be a very uneven and sometimes precarious process. The notion of gender has not been properly integrated into scholarly research, and women’s and gender studies have therefore been seen as an appendix to mainstream research in the humanities and the social sciences. This chapter aims at providing a meaningful picture of how gender studies have become part of the higher education system in Romania, what challenges have been met on the way and what future gender studies have in the education landscape. It also provides a comprehensive overview of the significance and importance of the TARGET project for the implementation of the first gender equality plan in the Romanian higher education system.

This paper focuses on the motivation of females to start businesses in developed and emerging economies. Although the issues related to the motivation of entrepreneurs have been widely studied, there are a few studies focusing on the differences in women’s entrepreneurial motivation in countries with different levels of market economy development. Furthermore, existing studies on female founders mainly adapt the concepts that have often been developed in male-dominated paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to explore in depth motivations of female entrepreneurs in different contexts and discover the dissimilarities in women’s entrepreneurial motivations in countries with different levels of economic development.

The qualitative research approach is applied in this study to explore the social-driven and profit-driven motives of female entrepreneurs. The authors have employed purposeful sampling to select cases. The authors investigated the motivations of 45 female entrepreneurs in Norway (12), Russia (21) and Ukraine (12). Semi-structured interviews were used to collect primary data. The authors have also triangulated the data collected from interviews with the data available on the internet, company reports and newspaper publications.

The findings indicate that women often pursuit business opportunities to satisfy social needs, rather than focusing on traditional business outcomes such as growth or profit. However, different contexts – the emerging economies context of Russia and Ukraine and the developed one of Norway – seem to influence the motivation to establish new ventures differently. The study found a stronger desire to contribute to a society’s needs among female founders in Norway compared to their counterparts in Russia and Ukraine. This indicates that cultural and social context in developed countries, such as in Norway, probably provides more possibilities for female entrepreneurs for self-realisation elsewhere leaving more room for focusing on societal issues in business in comparison with emerging countries contexts.

A novel conceptual contribution is the exploration of links between the social-driven and profit-driven motives of female entrepreneurs in emerging and developed economises. The study also adds to debates relating to context embeddedness of smaller firms.