Obituary: Giovanni Battista Sgritta, sociologist of inclusion

With the death of Giovanni Battista Sgritta, Italian Sociology has lost one of its most representative scholars. He was a refined intellectual, whose curiosity encompassed a multiplicity of cultural interests, ranging from history and philosophy, to art, music, and literature. These interests nurtured his broad knowledge of sociology that he shared with his students and collaborators, making Sociology a fascinating discipline bridging multiple frontiers of knowledge. Since the beginning of his long career, Sgritta was always fully engaged in relevant scientific activities at international level. It is worth remembering his early experience in Germany in the late Sixties, at the Soziologisches Institut of the University of Munich followed by two visiting professor periods at the beginning of the Seventies, and in the mid-Eighties in the Soviet Union at the Science Academy within a collaboration with the Italian National Research Centre (CNR). The Seventies were also the years of his visit to the Department of Sociology of the University of Essex, thanks to an agreement signed between CNR and NATO. Alongside these visiting experiences across Europe, during his career Sgritta held prestigious positions at international level, participating in research committees, programmes, and observatories focusing on family, childhood, and social welfare policy concerns. These three research fields, crosscutting with inequalities and exclusion issues, characterised his whole career as researcher. Hence, he coordinated the International Research Programme on Childhood as a Social Phenomenon: Implications for Future Social Policies funded by the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research in Vienna from 1987 to 1992, when he participated as Italian representative on the ‘Childhood Policies Co-ordinating Committee’ of the Council of Europe. In this regard, it is worth noting the production in 1987 of a national report titled Childhood as a Social Phenomenon. Implications for Future Policies, engaging 19 European and North American countries, and in 1994 the publication of Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics edited together with J. Qvortrup, M. Bardy and H. Wintersberger. Then, in the late Nineties Sgritta was responsible, on the Italian side, for research on the ‘Political participation of youth below voting age’, funded by the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research. He was, moreover, Vice-president of the Management Committee of the International Research on ‘Children’s Welfare in Ageing Europe’ within the European Cooperation Programme between 2001 and 2006. This stage of his career was characterised by pioneering studies on childhood, affirming the social construction of the sociological category of childhood and its neglected citizenship. Sgritta’s studies on childhood and youth were constantly crosscutting with those on the complex evolution of the generational relationships inside and outside the family. In this regard, it is worth remembering his experience, in the mid-Seventies, as the Italian representative in the ‘Groupe Internationale de Recherches sur le Divorce’. This activity was followed by both membership in the group responsible for the coordination of the survey on Changing patterns of European Family Life. A comparative analysis of 14 European countries (Sgritta,