Author: Stavroula Litsiou

Stavroula Litsiou is a researcher investigating nearly everything, occasionally including things she understands. Currently she reports in the fields of Immunology and working conditions in academia, objectively, of course, on the side of the powerless. Ph-almost-Done at the Leibniz Institute on Aging - Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) Jena, Germany. Enjoys a good argument, tolerates a bad one and has opinions to spare.

Comparing the #MeToo Movement to Power Abuse in Academia

Article 3
Performance Only in Hollywood
Searching for the Agency of Support Structures in Academia

 

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Once, a director’s phone call could end an actress’s career, and the film-making industry ran for decades on that consuming fear. After a century and one loud year in 2017, Hollywood workers cultivated the conditions to answer back: a union with teeth, a press hungry for the story, a public willing to believe the smaller – yet known and widely loved – voice. This did not instantly bring justice, not reliably; but it created a lever which can be pulled. German academia has spent that same century perfecting the opposite art: the high levels of hierarchy that never have to explain themselves, and in the rare cases they do, all happening behind closed doors, in a complicit silence. And sadly, a doctoral researcher screamed at, threatened with a ruined future, harassed, has no lever at all: no famous name, no structural body to fight their cause. They only have the established institutional processes, slow and fully dependent to the power abusers. These processes lacking autonomy and agency are worth tracing, because the gap they leave is a scandal that never quite becomes news. 

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Comparing the #MeToo Movement to Power Abuse in Academia

Article 2
The Casting Couch of Research Groups
Profiling Abusers and Victims in an Enabling Environment

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When the Weinstein allegations broke in 2017 and #MeToo went global, most people received the news as the result of an accumulated misconduct in the entertainment industry: powerful men, vulnerable young female actors, and a culture that protected the former at the expense of the latter. Even though it rapidly spread to other sectors concerning the public sphere like media and politics, fewer people connected the same dynamic to a place that looks nothing like a film set, the research group. 

Research institutions run on a remarkably similar machine to the one that fostered the abuse in Hollywood, albeit minus the glamour. A small number Continue Reading

Comparing the #MeToo Movement to Power Abuse in Academia

Article 1
No Incident Is Isolated
Rethinking How Academia Hears a Single Complaint 

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A few years ago, the world watched an industry built on charisma, gatekeeping, and closed doors come apart in public. #MeToo did not begin as a movement. The term has existed since 2006 but was popularized after the Weinstein allegations broke in 2017, revealing over three decades of sexual crimes which led to his immediate firing and eventual conviction. Throughout the years, the list of victims grew one private settlement at a time. Treated at first the way institutions always treat these things: as unfortunate, as unusual, as an isolated incident, as a matter between two people destined to be settled quietly behind closed doors and kept out of the trade press. What eventually broke that pattern was not Continue Reading