The European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation: An Innovative Advancement of Regional Cross-Border Governance but Still Far From Being a Panacea. European Diversity and Autonomy Papers EDAP 01/2020

To overcome the detrimental impact of the so-called “border effect”, the European Union and its member states established the INTERREG programs in 1990. The issue of a persisting “institutional void” hampered, however, substantially the actual policy impact of these cooperation over the years. In order to tackle this issue, the European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC) regulation was finally adopted in 2006 and amended in 2013 and provides since then a comprehensive institutional framework for cross-border cooperation. Through an analysis of the regulation and a comprehensive assessment of the various monitoring reports, two particular added values can be identified. First, while national governments maintain their role as gatekeepers of Regional Cross-Border Governance, the EGTC enables its members to exploit the newly provided supranational legal and institutional framework for cooperation. At the same time, institutional flexibility and various diversification opportunities concerning the policy, polity, and politics dimensions are implemented, which allows the creation of innovative and place-based territorial cooperation structures. A central conclusion of this article is that despite the EGTC regulation’s added value, this instrument constitutes no panacea concerning Regional Cross-Border Governance. Cooperation is still primarily dependent on the individual commitment by the members to create sustainable results, which is still the most decisive factor whether a cooperation succeeds or not

Pediatric Nurses in Early Childhood Intervention in Germany - Emergence of a New Professional Role: Situational Analysis and Mapping

In this essay, we show how an arena is created and how a new field of work for pediatric nursing emerges from it. The situation of pediatric nurses in early childhood intervention in Germany is presented, considering related social worlds and discourses as well as historical, social, and political processes. Based on a study using interview data of pediatric nurses, text documents and field notes, we demonstrate how components of the theory/methods package of situational analysis can be used to analyze the genesis of a specialized professional group in its embeddedness in an arena. In particular, the concepts of social worlds/arenas theory and the concept of processual ordering are applied. Mapping strategies are harnessed to structure discourse material in order to show the positioning of different elements in the arena and to discuss them in their interrelation and against the background of current developments in the nursing profession.In diesem Artikel veranschaulichen wir die Entstehung der Arena "Frühe Hilfen" und wie daraus ein neues Arbeitsfeld für die Kinderkrankenpflege hervorging. Die Situation der Kinderkrankenpflege wird unter Berücksichtigung sozialer Welten und Diskurse sowie historischer, sozialer und politischer Prozesse, die dafür eine Rolle spielen, dargestellt. Am Beispiel einer Studie mit Interviewdaten von Kinderkrankenpflegerinnen, Textdokumenten und Feldnotizen wird demonstriert, wie Komponenten des Theorie-Methoden-Pakets der Situationsanalyse angewendet werden können, um die Genese einer spezialisierten Berufsgruppe in ihrer Einbettung in eine Arena zu analysieren. Dabei findet insbesondere eine Auseinandersetzung mit Konzepten sozialer Welten und Arenen sowie des processual ordering statt. Mithilfe von Mapping-Strategien wird Diskursmaterial strukturiert, um die Positionierung verschiedener Elemente in der Arena aufzuzeigen und sie in ihrer Wechselbeziehung und vor dem Hintergrund aktueller Entwicklungen im Pflegeberuf zu diskutieren

Locational Choice and Secondary Movements from the Perspective of Forced Migrants: A Comparison of the Destinations Luxembourg and Germany

In 2015 and 2016, the enormous increase in asylum seekers travelling along the Balkan Route confronted the Member States of the European Union with an exceptional pressure on national asylum systems. Since then academic literature has revealed a reappraisal of the Common European Asylum System at regulative and policy implementation level, notably regarding the fair distribution of asylum seekers across Member States and regions. Yet we know very little about the locational choices of forced migrants or how those choices evolved and transformed during their journey. In this paper, we aim to shed light on those decision-making processes and (individual, subjective) locational choices based on the aspiration-ability model, drawing from a series of qualitative interviews with migrants held in Luxembourg and Germany in the context of the H2020 project CEASEVAL. We focus on the migrants' journeys to their actual recipient countries, highlighting mobility trajectories from the moment of first departure and on the process of decision-making regarding their choice of location. Then, we examine further mobility aspirations, which may lead to secondary mobility within or out of the country of residence. In the concluding section, we discuss the consequences of our findings for migration and asylum politics against the background of the "autonomy of migration" framework

Cross-border vocational training as processes of cross-border learning

In den letzten Jahren hat die grenzüberschreitende Berufsausbildung zunehmend an Bedeutung gewonnen. Die übergeordnete Forschungsfrage beschäftigt sich damit, wie regionale Lernprozesse in einer Grenzregion durch bilaterale grenzüberschreitende formale Bildungsabkommen entwickeln. Dafür wurde ein Modell regionalen Lernens in Grenzregionen basierend auf dem Modell von Wellbrock et al. (2012) entwickelt, das sich auf eine ganzheitliche Begrifflichkeit stützt und die Akteursperspektive in den Fokus stellt. Die Entwicklung der grenzüberschreitenden beruflichen Ausbildung unter Beteiligung verschiedener Akteure kann als intra- und interregionaler Lernprozess verstanden werden, der zu einer "grenzüberschreitenden Lernregion" führt. Die Analyse der untersuchten Strukturen unter Berücksichtigung der konzeptionellen Annahmen zeigt, dass die Lernprozesse in der saarländisch-lothringischen Grenzregion dynamisch sind und von Schlüsselpersonen mit Expertenwissen abhängen, genauso wie von vorteilhaften regionalen Gegebenheiten.In recent years cross-border vocational educational training (VET) in cross-border regions has gained more and more importance. The overall research question is how regional learning processes are shaped by bilateral cross-border formal learning agreements in a border region. Therefore, we build our own model of regional learning in border regions on Wellbrock et al. (2012) following an integrated conceptual perspective and focusing on the actor’s perspective. The development of this transboundary VET by a variety of actors can be considered to form an intra- und interregional learning process. The interpretation of the structures regarding the conceptual findings reveals that the learning processes in the Saarland-Lorraine border region are dynamic and depend on key actors with expert knowledge as well as advantageous regional characteristics

Caring for the elderly in the family or in the nation? Gender, women and migrant care labour in the Lega Nord

This article aims at gendering our understanding of populist radical right ideology, policy and activism in Italy. It does so by focusing on migrant care labour, which provides a strategic site for addressing the relationship between anti-immigration politics and the gendered and racialised division of work. Three arrangements and understandings of elderly care are analysed, whereby care work should be performed ‘in the family and in the nation’, ‘in the family/outside the nation’ and ‘in the nation/outside the family’. Party documents and interviews with women activists are used to show how the activists’ views and experiences partly diverge from the Lega Nord rhetoric and policy on immigration, gender and care work. The article locates populist radical right politics in the context of the international division of reproductive labour in Italy and suggests the relevance of analysing gender relations in populist radical right parties in connection with national care regimes

Macrophages control tissue homeostasis via Ferritin heavy chain

Due to its inherent capacity to catalyze reduction-oxidation reactions, iron is at the center stage of vital biological functions essential to most living organisms. Paradoxically, these same inherent characteristics are also responsible for the deleterious effects of iron. In the intracellular environment, iron is oxidized to its inert biological form by the ferroxidase activity of Ferritin Heavy Chain (FTH). In this Thesis we used a genetic loss of function approach in mice to demonstrate that FTH is essential to control the deleterious effects of iron and as such to maintain homeostasis in vivo. Namely we found that global deletion of the Fth allele is lethal in adult mice, an outcome prevented by the expression of FTH in macrophages. To investigate further the mechanisms by which FTH in macrophages contributes to maintain homeostasis we generated and characterized a genetically modified mouse strain in which FTH was tagged with a small V5 epitope. We found that contrary to what would be expected FTH is not secreted from macrophages to exert its protective effect. We conclude that FTH expression in macrophages acts in a cell autonomous manner to support homeostasis

3 versus 7 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging for parcellations of subcortical brain structures in clinical settings

7 Tesla (7T) magnetic resonance imaging holds great promise for improved visualization of the human brain for clinical purposes. To assess whether 7T is superior regarding localization procedures of small brain structures, we compared manual parcellations of the red nucleus, subthalamic nucleus, substantia nigra, globus pallidus interna and externa. These parcellations were created on a commonly used clinical anisotropic clinical 3T with an optimized isotropic (o)3T and standard 7T scan. The clinical 3T MRI scans did not allow delineation of an anatomically plausible structure due to its limited spatial resolution. o3T and 7T parcellations were directly compared. We found that 7T outperformed the o3T MRI as reflected by higher Dice scores, which were used as a measurement of interrater agreement for manual parcellations on quantitative susceptibility maps. This increase in agreement was associated with higher contrast to noise ratios for smaller structures, but not for the larger globus pallidus segments. Additionally, control-analyses were performed to account for potential biases in manual parcellations by assessing semi-automatic parcellations. These results showed a higher consistency for structure volumes for 7T compared to optimized 3T which illustrates the importance of the use of isotropic voxels for 3D visualization of the surgical target area. Together these results indicate that 7T outperforms c3T as well as o3T given the constraints of a clinical setting

The Rise of Religious Armed Conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa: No Simple Answers

In June 2017, the European Union announced its support for Sahelian governments in fighting religious extremists. This move is a reaction to severe religious violence in many sub-Saharan countries. As of mid-2017, eight out of ten armed conflicts in the region are displaying a religious dimension. Either warring factions differ by religious identity, or they have incompatible ideas regarding the role of religion in the state. Ideas-based "theological" conflicts have strongly increased recently. Geographical hotspots of theological armed conflicts are the Sahel, Nigeria, and Somalia. All these conflicts either have already spilled over to neighbouring countries or are likely to do so. The consequences have been extreme: the violence has claimed thousands of lives and produced millions of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees, and it continues to undermine the political, economic, and social development of the affected countries. Although Islamist insurgencies predominate in ideas-based religious conflicts, Christian rebel groups in Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda have also been active since the turn of the millennium. Countries with mixed religious populations are prone to interreligious conflicts, which has materialised in cases such as the Central African Republic, Nigeria, and Côte d'Ivoire. The causes of these conflicts are not yet fully understood, though they appear to demonstrate a mixture of religious and secular roots. Parallel ethnic- and religious-identity boundaries increase the risks of interreligious confrontation. Weak states both enable the activities of religious extremists and make their ideology a tempting alternative for the population. External support for religious extremism from countries in North Africa and the Middle East poses a special problem. There are no easy solutions. Efforts to counter religious conflicts must focus on religious and non-religious causes as well as security and development. Development prevents religious violence in the long run; security operations can help hinder or deal with imminent threats. International actors should support African governments, but sustainable policies will be in vain if they do not build on African efforts and capacity