Dekonstruktion von Korruption: die Bedeutung des EU-Beitritts für die westeuropäische Medienberichterstattung über Korruption in Rumänien

"Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Darstellung von Korruption in Rumänien im zeitlichen Umfeld des EU-Beitritts (01.01.2006 bis 31.12.2007) in neun ausgewählten Publikationen aus Frankreich, Deutschland, Großbritannien und der Schweiz. Die Untersuchung verbindet qualitative mit quantitativen Untersuchungsmethoden, um unterschiedliche Diskurse aufdecken zu können. Gibt es einen westeuropäischen Diskurs über Korruption in Rumänien? Die Untersuchungsergebnisse belegen, dass der Beitritt zur EU die kommunikative Struktur innerhalb des westeuropäischen Diskurses und die Wahrnehmung Rumäniens im Korruptionsdiskurs verändert haben. Durch die mangelhafte Darstellung der Tatbestände in Rumänien einerseits und das Verschweigen der Entwicklungen nach dem EU-Beitritt andererseits ist der Diskurs über Korruption seinem entwicklungstheoretischen Anspruch nicht gerecht geworden. Die Medien erweisen sich in diesem Fall als Abbild der politischen Situation und nicht als neutrale Kontrollinstanz." (Autorenreferat

Between a Shrinking and a Shifting Space: The Symbolic Inclusion of the Disability Movement in Policy‐Making in Romania

In this paper, we explore how political opportunity structures for the inclusion of the disability movement in Romania are shaped from the perspective of self-advocacy and service provider NGOs active in the field of disability. Building on in-depth semi-structured interviews with nine representatives of self-advocacy and service provider organizations, we explore how they understood the processes by which they participated in policy formulation processes. Our results show that both service provider and self-advocacy organizations feel that their inclusion in the policymaking process is mostly symbolic and tokenistic, but that this can and did change in the last years. However, despite a general concern for a shrinking space for civil society organizations influence on policymaking in Central and East European countries, disability organizations in Romania describe the political opportunity landscape as a fluctuating one, rather than one that is evolving in one direction. Moreover, whereas service provider organizations seem to perceive higher levels of inclusion on the national level, whereas self-advocacy NGOs seem to perceive themselves as being better included and more influential on local levels. This also reflects the presence of bottom-up federative efforts of service provider organizations as opposed to the lack of successful bottom-up federative efforts in the field of disability based self-advocacy organizations. Finally, our paper problematizes inclusion in policy-making as an unequivocally positive process, showing how disability organizations sometimes choose not to participate in order not to legitimize problematic decisions through their symbolic presence in the negotiation process

Teachers’ Right to Health in the Policy Debates During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Hungary and Romania

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments worldwide suspended face-to-face education in schools to manage the spread of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. Romania and Hungary were not exceptional in this regard during the first wave of the pandemic. However, further along, the two countries’ policy pathways strongly diverged. Hungary strategized keeping schools open to ensure parents could attend to their employment obligations. Romania suspended face-to-face education in schools for long periods. The paper looks at these two national cases through a Critical Frame Analysis (Dombos et al., 2012) of education policy debates during the initial three waves of the pandemic (March 2020 – July 2021). It answers the question: How were the health rights of teachers and the health crisis in education framed in the education policy debates during the Covid-19 pandemic? Policy documents and policy related position documents by non-government actors were selected by country experts from both countries and coded inductively looking at the right to education, the right to health, and the relationship between economic activities and education. We present our findings concerning how teachers’ rights to health are featured in the policy debates between the government, oppositional political parties, trade unions and other stakeholders. Finally, we use our analysis to point to recommendations addressing the complex challenge of equally ensuring vulnerable pupils’ rights to education and teachers’ rights to health through coherent crisis management policies

Interview with Leyla Safta-Zecheria--March 14, 2017

Interview themes 00:00 Introduction 00:55 Given her training in various disciplines, how Safta-Zecheria defines her field of scholarly interest 02:40 What brought Safta-Zecheria to the study of psychiatric hospitals and orphanages 06:20 Personal experiences that influenced her interest in the subject 08:00 On how Safta-Zecheria's perspective on the topic has changed over time 13:40 On the critique of human rights claims and interventions and, if not human rights, then what? 18:15 Parallels between dissent under state socialism and the nature of human rights claims (does the subaltern ever get to speak?) 26:00 The paradox of therapeutic interventions and power: can there be therapy/amelioration without repression? 32:40 On how Safta-Zecheria learned about anti-psychiatry 37:25 On patient "self-determination" and its challenges 41:30 Safta-Zecheria's take on theory (specifically Foucault's biopolitics) and its application 45:15 Are there viable alternatives to biopolitical approaches to this topic? 51:40 Whether a patient can both be considered to have agency as well as to be embedded in a repressive power structure 58:40 Academic institutions where Safta-Zecheria has studied (Humboldt, Bilgi, Bremen, CEU) 1:02:15 Social projects in which she has been involved (specifically in Brazil), and the apparently "endless" opening that "stopped seeming endless" around 2010 (as experienced from Turkey in particular) 1:12:40 On the first signs that the "endlessness" was coming to an end 1:17:05 On why she decided to go to CEU and the atmosphere there 1:19:00 How Safta-Zecheria characterizes the time we are living in 1:22:50 Her views on Europe, its trajectory and significance both as the EU and as a concept 1:26:00 Books and individuals who have had a strong impact on Safta-Zecheria (Book: Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed) 1:29:30 On how, "in order act politically and to do something, there need to be some geographic conditions of possibility" (i.e., you have to be in one place)Interview with Leyla Safta-Zecheria, PhD student in the Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations at the Central European University in Budapest. The interview was conducted in Vienna, Austria, on March 14, 2017. Safta-Zecheria has an MA in European Ethnology from the Humboldt University in Berlin and has also studied in Bremen and at Istanbul Bilgi University. She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation at CEU, which is tentatively titled “Away towards the Asylum: The Politics of Biopolitics in Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization in Romania.”1_a147oxh

Teachers’ digital competences in the first educational policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis in four countries

With the sudden widespread closure of schools since February-March 2020 due to the physical distancing measures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital competences became a focus of attention, being of central importance to the swift and equitable transition to the various forms of emergency remote teaching implemented throughout the world as a strategy to insure continuity in education. This almost instantaneous mass shift to teaching online has made transparent great disparities in how digital competences – particularly those of teachers - were conceptualized, taught and assessed within various educational programs. We present a comparative analysis of the approaches to teachers’ learning and professional development that state and non-state actors in four Central and East European countries have articulated in the first months of COVID-19 related lockdown. We take a Critical Frame Analysis approach to exploring the roles played by state and non-state actors in the four countries in conceptually framing the relationship between the digital competences required in emergency remote teaching and teachers’ learning and professional development at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. It is suggested that the educational policy debate at the beginning of the crisis rendered visible: a) that this massive sudden shift required understanding digitalization as a complex multifaceted process requiring levels of digital and pedagogical competence teachers were unlikely to have previously developed; b) that addressing these issues through short-term interventions would only exacerbate the risk of ignoring arising equity issues; c) that situating emergency measures in the context of potential medium and long-term developments could open opportunities to explore mainstreaming the digitalization of education and promoting blended learning, as well as offer a better perspective on issues of digital poverty and the inequitable impact of not addressing it adequately will have in the futur