Sociology of a new field of knowledge: gender studies in post-communist Eastern Europe. GSPE Working Paper 01/27/2009

A new research field named "gender studies" or "feminist studies" has emerged during the 1990s in East-European and post-Soviet countries. The scientific productions in that field often function as experts' studies and aim at contributing to improve women’s condition. Established by agents who simultaneously act in several social spaces (scientific, associative or political), feminist studies are at the crossroads of academic and activist, national and international dynamics. Therefore, we consider them as a new discipline at the core of the social and political programmes of recomposition after the collapse of communist regimes, and as an indicator for the rebuilding of social sciences, the emergence of new academic topics, the international circulation and importation of scientific concerns, the reconstruction of intellectual elites in the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CCEE). The paper offers some guidelines for a sociology of this new field of knowledge production