This collectively written article aims to offer a bird's eye view of the Italian debates about precarity in employment and life, as captured in discussions among participants in a focus group held in Milan in 2006. The chief topics that emerged from this discussion include the feminization of labour, feminist practices and methodologies, representation/participation, and guaranteed income. Here, we give as much space as possible to the diverse voices of participants and their strategies for transformation.

In _Friendship_, Francesco Alberoni differentiates friendship from other interpersonal relationships and shows that the friendship encounter embodies justice and thus resists dehumanizing societal trends. The ideals of friendship enjoin us to realize the republican virtues in everyday life.

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, women’s studies research and theoretical confrontations became common both inside and outside Italian universities, producing a substantial cultural and scientific inheritance. However, the teaching of such content had to follow an accidental path deprived of any institutional visibility. Women’s studies was forced to adapt itself to existing didactic structures, ‘hidden’ inside single courses and single disciplines, without being evident itself in the university. Only in the late 1990s did such studies become institutionally formalized. Nowadays, (...) there is a rapid growth in women’s studies in Italy, thanks particularly to the course,Women Politics and Institutions, created in 2004. In this Open forum, the authors try to suggest what future scenarios might look like, anticipating a not yet realized horizon. (shrink)