'Girls into STEM and Komm mach MINT’: English and German approaches to support girls’ STEM career-related learning

European economies require STEM skilled people, yet compared with boys, girls demonstrate a tendency to reject some STEM study and STEM careers. This paper briefly reviews key factors that influence this phenomenon. It then introduces four examples of campaigns and initiatives that encourage girls to consider further participation in STEM in England and MINT in Germany as part of their career ambitions. Evidence of the impact of German initiatives is presented. It concludes that where there is a deliberate strategy linked with defined actions which tackle issues that are specific to girls, then gender imbalances can begin to change

Experiences in Process Oriented Reorganization through Reference Modelling in Public Administrations - The Case Study REGIO@KOMM

During the last years the optimisation of business processes has gained more and more importance in the context of modernising public administrations. In line with the concept of electronic government (eGovernment) citizens demand not only an improved design of internet sites, but also the creation of real added value to administrational services. In dimensions of benefits (from the citizen’s point of view) and in dimensions of cost reduction (from the administrations’ point of view) the added value can be generated by providing fully transactional online citizen services. The establishment of such services should be supported by reorganising the underlying business processes in terms of process organisation and enabling ICT. Approximately 13,000 German municipalities mainly have to deal with the same spectrum of tasks. The administration processes that are necessary to fulfil those tasks share strong structural analogies. Within process oriented reorganisation projects, reference models can contribute to cost reduction in the phase of to-be modelling. Aim of this paper is to present experiences in applying reference modelling within the process oriented reorganisation project Regio@KomM in public administrations. The reorganisation of the process of issuing a general debit note authorisation exemplifies the practical applicability and the value potential of reference modelling in public administration

Improvising Goethe’s Faust Part One in two Berlin high school theatre classes for cross-cultural dialogue among Turkish-German students

By taking a prototypical German text i.e. Goethe’s Faust Part One to two high-school theatre-classes in Berlin, I explored how Turkish-German students engage performatively with the idea of German identity. Through an improvisational treatment of the play, students performed activities based on the text which revealed their cultural identity. Emerging themes of the research show cross-cultural exchanges of students on issues of religion, politics, the role of family, socio-economic status, sexuality and Leitkultur. This is an interdisciplinary study and the findings of the research contribute to approaches within the field of post-migrant theatre in Germany and debates on Turkish-German cultural integration. The project showed that issues related to Turkish-German cultural integration must be understood emotionally and psychologically. The results of the study showed that over and above everything, lack of compassion and open-heartedness featured strongly as a prototypical German characteristic. Regardless of progressive and conservative values, in all performances, a German person was identified as Faust, someone cold-hearted and lacking warmth. My students also reflected on the character of Gretchen and found similarities with her dilemmas and those of women in Turkish-German households. Hence, what emerged from the performances were self-reflective and honest dialogues on how Turkish-German students relate to German culture at large. Instead of addressing the issues of cultural integration from a lens of identity politics, migration policy makers need to consider and focus on emotional differences between the two communities. Theatre in diverse classrooms can provide embodied engagements with individuals, whose voices need to be heard loud and clear on how they perceive the ‘other’

Process Modeling in Brazilian Public Administrations: The domain-specific PICTURE approach

This paper discusses a process modeling case, which applies a semantic building block-based approach as a means for business process modeling in Brazilian municipal public administrations (MPA). It derives a set of distinctive requirements to process modeling methods that are refined to the specific demands of Brazilian MPAs. We introduce the modeling method PICTURE and discuss whether and why its application in Brazilian MPAs is appropriate. We evaluate it against the before mentioned set of requirements. It could be shown that PICTURE delivers valuable support for Brazilian MPA process modeling projects

Integration: The Cultural Politics Of Migration And Nation In The New German Public

This dissertation examines public discourse on culture and integration and asks how do mediated public discussions about integration reproduce norms of national culture and identity that operate to represent and manage “Other” (immigrant, minority, etc.) populations in the German context? Through a case study approach, this dissertation uses critical discourse theory to analyze public campaigns, media events, and mediated controversies since the mid-2000s that sought to define the qualifications for cultural citizenship. Although in recent years an increasing number of publications have addressed Germany’s diverse and transnational population, examinations of processes and policies of integration have tended to focus either on the level of the government or on the level of everyday life. Although ideas about integration and multiculturalism are predominantly forged through events and the surrounding representations in the media, the mid-level processes of the media sphere have been neglected in scholarship. Using Foucault’s theories on biopolitics, I argue that integration discourse divides the population into normative nationals and candidates for integration, consisting of individuals with apparent immigrant heritage. This division sets up a neoliberal framework of perpetual evaluation that separates the productive from the threatening integration candidates while reinforcing normative foundations of Germanness. This dissertation includes three sections. The first outlines two major foundations of German national ideas: The Romantic nation represented by the idea of Heimat and the rational, Enlightenment notion of Germany as a bastion of Western values. This section examines the historical and theoretical underpinnings of these schemas of identity and the place of “new Germans” within them. The second section examines the construction of “the new Germany” in the first decade of the new millennium through the media’s celebration of immigrant patriots and the emergence of “soccer patriotism.” The three chapters in this section examine three different cases in the media that illuminate the relationship between patriotism and productivity and the role of diversity in this new national formation. The third section analyzes media events that construct boundaries separating integration successes from failures. These cases expose the continuities linking celebrations and condemnations of immigrants and new Germans

Aesthetics of the anthropocene : an analysis of german rap’s critique on the surveillance system of time

Post-modernity is thought of as an era of contradictions. Mass media, the Web 3.0, and cor-porate governance cause an increasing level of insecurity regarding the validity of infor-mation. Furthermore, liberty is renamed into freedom to legitimize polluting and exploitive actions which appear altogether grounded on managerial interests. In Marcusian thought, this dissertation contributes to the function of the arts as means of knowledge production, while focusing on German rap as one of the most consumed forms of post-modern popular culture. The work at hand argues that to keep society under control, the metaphysical element of time has been gradually turned into a tool of surveillance. Drawing on Kutschera’s con-cept of aesthetics, a critical, textual analysis of eight contemporary German rap lyrics is conducted. The two-sided argumentation firstly focuses on a vertical time axis of post-in-dustrial society, in which time has become the object of a trade-off calculation between physical and digital control and one’s individual material wealth. The second part argues along a horizontal time axis. Physical control mechanisms have been in place since the days of imperialism, as the principles of colonialism moved through time and space to secure the current hegemony of Western nation-states. Hence, climate change and the refugee move-ments were caused and are fostered. The dissertation closes with a change of perspective, which is achieved through two affirmative rap lyrics. In turn, possible lines of further re-search are generated

HOW MAINSTREAMING AND MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE STRUCTURES EMPOWER PLACE-BASED APPROACHES TO REFUGEE INTEGRATION: THE CASE OF ALTENA, GERMANY

This thesis explores the importance of strong place-based techniques for refugee integration. The integration of refugees, when understood as a two-way process between the host community and refugees, is vital in moving away from dehumanized, national level representations, towards a more realistic view of refugees as individuals who are attempting to live and belong in their new communities. The German system mainstreams integration efforts at the national level by formulating policies of education, health care, and employment for the population as a whole (rather than specifically for refugees as a group). This system empowers towns and municipalities to apply more targeted, effective approaches to integration that fit the specific needs of their communities. Multilevel governance structures also aid in the ability of local level governments to apply targeted integration approaches, as they prevent potentially ill-fitting top-down initiatives from disrupting place-based measures. This thesis examines Altena, a German town known for its progressive integration techniques, through secondary sources and interviews with the mayor and integration team. Their efforts include valuing practicality over formality; emphasizing communication between civil society, the local government, and refugees; creating open, accessible social spaces; and conducting integration initiatives with the spirit of moral responsibility. Ultimately, this thesis examines how processes of multilevel governance and mainstreaming empower the local level to create policies and programs that promote more targeted forms of integration. From Altena, we learn just how valuable this relative autonomy is for the local level.Master of Art

Crisis management on the agenda? A big data approach to analyzing how the Norwegian national news media facilitated public response to the Covid-19 crisis.

In public health crises, people need information to help them make decisions about how to protect themselves and others from risk. Successful crisis response is thus dependent on the dissemination of efficacious information. As online news is where most people get the majority of their information, providing it during a crisis is a task for journalists and the news media. However, there are gaps in the knowledge about how the news media fills their role in communicating health information during public health crises. With this thesis, I sought to help lessen the gap of knowledge about how the news media facilitate crisis response by analyzing what they communicated and how communication changed over different stages of the Covid-19 crisis in Norway. I apply a generative machine learning approach, topic modeling, to analyze more than twenty-two thousand online news articles published by two of Norway's most prominent national newspapers, VG and Aftenposten. The model uses Bayesian statistics to categorize text based on similar words appearing together and their likelihood of appearing with other words. The method allows researchers to discover latent topics and patterns within extensive data, producing comparable results to human coders at a scale that lends itself particularly well to give detailed descriptions of news media communication efforts. Using the topic model results, I propose and test a method for operationalizing and analyzing how risk and crisis communication changes in news media content over time. I identified topics reflective of the coverage of the crisis according to their conduciveness to sensemaking and self-efficacy in the Norwegian public — building on theory on crisis and emergency risk communication (CERC). The concept of the creeping crisis provided a theoretical basis for differentiating the Covid-19 crisis from other crises. Furthermore, agenda-setting provided an additional theoretical lens to help better understand the effectiveness of this communication on behavioral change and response. The applied method was found to be fruitful in giving insight into how the selected news organizations covered the Covid-19 crisis in Norway. I identified 200 different topics covered by VG and Aftenposten during the first stages of the Coronavirus crisis. 75 of these topics focused on the crisis itself. Subsequent topics identified staple news topics such as sports teams, culture and movies, social issues, and more. 48 topics were identified as conducive to crisis management, and these were analyzed based on their prevalence over different stages of the crisis. The findings suggest that Norwegian news media disseminated information facilitating crisis response throughout the first 15 months of the pandemic, starting from the pre-crisis stage to the initial crisis stage and into the maintenance stage of the pandemic. Communication changed dramatically between stages. All in all, these topics reflected 12.5 % of all news coverage published by the two newspapers. The results indicate that this coverage largely reflected assumptions about changing communication needs during a crisis, but topics also reflect additional risk communication efforts resulting from the extended timeframe of the Covid-19 crisis