Governing through consensus? The European Semester, soft power and education governance in the EU

This paper discusses the workings of the European Semester (ES) in relation to the policy field of education. My study shows how the ES enables the steering of education policy through encouraging specific economic and employment-related actions by European Union (EU) member states. With a focus on the relationship between the EU institutions and member states, this paper examines how the ES discursively promotes certain approaches to education through country-specific recommendations (CSRs). In this study, CSRs are revealed as policy spaces where European and national interests are brought together, enabling shared problem definition and collective learning. The paper illustrates how policy moves through translation and negotiation in the construction of CSR. The evidence drawn on here comes from analysis of CSRs in 2011–2016 and 15 semi-structured interviews with key policy actors, mainly from the European Commission, Council and Parliament. This paper concludes that CSRs work through soft power to manage governing tensions through translation and by building convergence and consensus. The analysis is framed theoretically by research on governing and knowledge and draws on a social constructivist perspective on policy work.

‘They tried to exterminate us for 600 years, would you trust them?’ Antigypsyism and the post-racial use of intersectionality in state response to Intimate Partner Violence

This paper is an invitation to critically interrogate the ‘post-racial’ understanding of intersectionality in European policy work on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), through a focus on Antigypsyism in Spain’s specialised institutions. Spain’s ‘gender violence’ law has inspired international admiration for introducing measures aimed at the protection of all women regardless of their status or situation. However, its criminal justice system is marked by centuries of legislation constructing Romani women as innately suspicious. Semi-structured interviews conducted in IPV specialised courts, local police, and support services in Madrid indicate that practitioners reject legal colour-blindness and support intercultural mediation but refuse to address this racist legacy. Their intervention exposes Romani plaintiffs to harm by (1) promoting their cultural assimilation, (2) questioning their victim status, and (3) turning against their community support networks.

The Role of Local Actors in Peacekeeping: The Cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone

With the advent of multidimensional peacekeeping, in considering the changing nature of conflicts in the post–Cold War period, the role of local actors has become crucial to the execution of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mandate. Just as peacekeeping does not have space in the UN charter, local actors do not have a clearly defined space in the UN-led conflict resolution process. However, they have gained recognition, especially in policy work, and slowly in the academic discourse, as academics and practitioners have begun to find ways of making peacekeeping and peacebuilding more effective in the 21st century. Therefore the construction and perception of local actors by international arbitrators play an important and strategic role in creating and shaping space for the former to actively establish peace where violent conflict is imminent. Local actors have independently occupied spaces during and after the conflict, and although they bring a comparative advantage, especially as gatekeepers to local communities, they have largely been kept on the periphery.

Getting Real about Unknowns in Complex Policy Work

As with all public policy work, education policies are demanding. Policy workers need to ‘know’ a lot—about the problems they are addressing, the people who need to be engaged, the promises they can make in response, the context they are working in, and the processes they will follow to implement. Most policy workers answer questions about such issues within the structures of plan and control processes used to devise budgets and projects. These structures limit their knowledge gathering, organization and sense-making activities to up-front planning activities, and even though sophisticated tools like Theories of Change suggest planners ‘know’ all that is needed for policy success, they often do not. Policies are often fraught with ‘unknowns’ that cannot be captured in passive planning processes and thus repeatedly undermine even the best laid plans. Through a novel strategy that asks how much one knows about the answers to 25 essential policy questions, and an application to recent education policy interventions in Mozambique, this paper shows that it is possible to get real about unknowns in policy work. Just recognizing these unknowns exist—and understanding why they do and what kind of challenge they pose to policy workers—can help promote a more modest and realistic approach to doing complex policy work.

Making Meaning Together: Heritage site management and new approaches to meaning-making

<p>This dissertation looks at how those who manage and interpret heritage sites are incorporating into their practice, new thinking about the way visitors make meaning. Recent research has emphasised visitors' agency, and drawn attention to the cultural and political work of heritage performance. The ways visitors use emotion and imagination has also received greater attention. Rather than heritage value as intrinsic to sites, and best identified by the professional, recent theoretical understandings position visitors as active co-creators of heritage. How these new ideas might be applied in practice, and how organisations could most productively share authority for meaning-making, has not been sufficiently addressed. This research positions itself in that gap, and seeks to contribute to a conversation about how theory translates to practice. The Department of Conservation (DOC) was selected as an information-rich case study. At the time of research, the Department was in its third and final phase of new policy work that places greater emphasis on working in collaboration with others. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four DOC staff from across a range of roles. A further three interviews were undertaken with DOC partners and a contractor connected with sites discussed by DOC interviewees. The findings show that while heritage managers accept that visitors will make a variety of meanings at a site, they do not currently have a robust understanding of the meanings their visitors are making; of what they think and feel, and what a visit to the site really means to them. Only recently has getting this knowledge really appeared a priority, and organisations are still working out how best to collect this data, and how it could then inform their practice. This lack of understanding has inhibited practitioners' ability to respond to visitors, and to recognise the cultural work they do. When it came to partnerships, organisations were more invested in both understanding and responding to the other party. In some cases, they were willing to add to or modify their own ideas about what the value of the heritage was, or what stories it could be used to tell. A flexible and reflexive practice is advocated, in which organisations are clear about their own goals, recognise and engage with the meanings visitors and partners make, and are open to the possibility of being changed themselves in the process.</p>

Making Meaning Together: Heritage site management and new approaches to meaning-making

<p>This dissertation looks at how those who manage and interpret heritage sites are incorporating into their practice, new thinking about the way visitors make meaning. Recent research has emphasised visitors' agency, and drawn attention to the cultural and political work of heritage performance. The ways visitors use emotion and imagination has also received greater attention. Rather than heritage value as intrinsic to sites, and best identified by the professional, recent theoretical understandings position visitors as active co-creators of heritage. How these new ideas might be applied in practice, and how organisations could most productively share authority for meaning-making, has not been sufficiently addressed. This research positions itself in that gap, and seeks to contribute to a conversation about how theory translates to practice. The Department of Conservation (DOC) was selected as an information-rich case study. At the time of research, the Department was in its third and final phase of new policy work that places greater emphasis on working in collaboration with others. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four DOC staff from across a range of roles. A further three interviews were undertaken with DOC partners and a contractor connected with sites discussed by DOC interviewees. The findings show that while heritage managers accept that visitors will make a variety of meanings at a site, they do not currently have a robust understanding of the meanings their visitors are making; of what they think and feel, and what a visit to the site really means to them. Only recently has getting this knowledge really appeared a priority, and organisations are still working out how best to collect this data, and how it could then inform their practice. This lack of understanding has inhibited practitioners' ability to respond to visitors, and to recognise the cultural work they do. When it came to partnerships, organisations were more invested in both understanding and responding to the other party. In some cases, they were willing to add to or modify their own ideas about what the value of the heritage was, or what stories it could be used to tell. A flexible and reflexive practice is advocated, in which organisations are clear about their own goals, recognise and engage with the meanings visitors and partners make, and are open to the possibility of being changed themselves in the process.</p>

Changes of Learning Communication Models in New Normal Adaptation: From Classroom Learning to Distance Learning Environment

Covid-19 pandemic has a significant impact on various aspects of life, both individually, organizationally and nationally. The decision of various countries in the world to do a "lockdown" in order to limit the transmission of the plague has an impact on continuity of economic wheels to education. Educational institutions began to close because of scarcity of students and difficulties in covering operational costs so that many teachers and management were laid off. For educational institutions that still survive must play a strategy to stay afloat and maintain their students able to learn, with the policy ‘Work from Home’ and ‘School from Home’. The pandemic to this day is not over yet and it is predicted that it will last long until the antivirus is found. However, in anticipation of bankruptcy, the government adopted adaptation of new habits (New Normal), habits that emphasize the implementation of health protocols in every activity. To carry out health protocols, educational institutions change the learning patterns from learning in classrooms to online learning. This has an impact on lecturers with demands to adapt quickly to existing changes. This study tries to analyze and examine the ability of lecturers to adapt learning communication models from classroom-based learning to online-based learning. With hope that this research will become a reference for the developed communication model and its application in adaptation of new habits (New Normal). The study was conducted by examining the results of previous study and in-depth interviews with lecturers to get a diverse picture so that generic conclusions can be drawn.

Facing it: assessing the immediate emotional impacts of calorie labelling using automatic facial coding

Although there has been a proliferation of research and policy work into how nudges shape people's behaviour, most studies stop far short of consumer welfare analysis. In the current work, we critically reflect on recent efforts to provide insights into the consumer welfare impact of nudges using willingness to pay and subjective well-being reports and explore an unobtrusive approach that can speak to the immediate emotional impacts of a nudge: automatic facial expression coding. In an exploratory lab study, we use facial expression coding to assess the short-run emotional impact of being presented with calorie information about a popcorn snack in the context of a stylised ‘Cinema experience’. The results of the study indicate that calorie information has heterogeneous impacts on people's likelihood of choosing the snack and on the emotions they experience during the moment of choice which varies based on their level of health-consciousness. The information does not, however, affect the emotions people go on to experience while viewing movie clips, suggesting that the emotional effects of the information are short-lived. We conclude by emphasising the potential of automatic facial expression coding to provide new insights into the immediate emotional impacts of nudges and calling for further research into this promising technique.