Anna Durnová

Governing through intimacy: Explaining care policies through ‘sharing a meaning’:

The article suggests that we can develop a better understanding of the dynamic of governing in social policies through the lens of ‘intimacy’. Intimacy – a deep personal knowledge about body and mind which changes during the dying process – encompasses validation of one’s emotional experience. In that way, intimacy links the emotional content of dying to discursive dimensions of dignity usually associated with end-of-life care. The analysis describes how the Czech organization Homecoming has constructed its concept of end-of-life care on intimacy, and in so doing, steers specific meanings in the policy field. Hence, intimacy suggests paying more attention to modes of ‘sharing a meaning’, through which policies come to be. The article mediates between psychosocial theorizing of emotions, poststructuralist policy analysis, and current debates on governing in health care and social policies in order to uncover the role of intimacy in the dynamics of governing.

A Tale of ‘Fat Cats’ and ‘Stupid Activists’: Contested Values, Governance and Reflexivity in the Brno Railway Station Controversy

ABSTRACT The article explores one of the biggest controversies over sustainability in modern Czech history, a protracted conflict over whether the Brno railway station should be re-built in a new location. By examining the language of the interaction between a ‘modernizing discourse’ and a ‘sustainability discourse’, the article highlights reflexivity as analytic enterprise that bares the governance dimension of policy conflicts. The reflexive analysis focuses on how actors justify their positions, how they distinguish themselves from their opponents and how they express trust in their own group. It reveals that both discourses are not only related to the re-location issue per se, but that they entail contested notions of legitimate knowledge and modes of governance. Since such power contest is common in sustainability controversies, the reflexive analysis suggests a novel analytical agenda for addressing policy conflicts in sustainability issues.

Introduction to critical policy studies

Critical policy studies, like policy studies generally, focuses on the policymaking process. That focus includes two key concerns: one involves how policies are decided in a political setting and the other is focused on the practices of policy analysis, specifically on how they address the formulation and assessment of particular policies and their outcomes. As such, critical policy studies has emerged as an effort to understand policy processes not only in terms of apparent inputs and outputs, but more importantly in terms of the interests, values and normative assumptions – political and social – that shape and inform these processes (see Barbehön et al., Chapter 13, this volume; Lejano and Park, Chapter 15, this volume; and Åm, Chapter 16, this volume). Rejecting the assumption that analysis can be neutral, entirely uncommitted to and removed from interests and values, critical policy studies seeks to identify and examine existing commitments against normative criteria such as social justice, democracy and empowerment (see Fainstein, Chapter 10, this volume).1 Basic to policy analysis generally are two very old ideas – namely, the ideas that government decisions should be based on sound knowledge, and that such knowledge should rise above politics. Although these ideas have their roots in the ancient notion of rule by philosopher kings, in the modern world these ideas point instead to the conception of a governing elite of technical experts – or technocracy – working as a neutral instrument on behalf of human progress. Critical policy studies throws the ideas of ‘expertocracy’ and technical governance into question, regarding them as advancing both an unrealistic promise and a threat to practical knowledge and democratic governance. One of the most important issues for critical policy studies, then, has to do with the nature of knowledge, both the knowledge used to shape policy and the kinds of knowledge and assumptions that guide the implementation of policy decisions. Basic to this approach has been a critique of the positivist conception of knowledge that has long informed the theory and practice of policy studies and policy analysis in particular. Critical

Interpretive policy analysis in a French setting. The Fifth Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference, Grenoble, June 2010

In this issue, authors present a collection of contributions that also draws on a French source: the 5th Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) Conference, which took place in Grenoble, France, from 23-25 June 2010

Discursive Approaches to Public Policy: Politics, Argumentation, and Deliberation

Over the last two decades, the so-called discursive paradigm has emerged in both Europe and the USA to analyze policy and grasp policy processes differently. Rejecting the dominance of rational choice theory and condemning the illusion of an objective knowledge for and on policy, this paradigm draws inspiration from the “linguistic turn” in philosophy and the social sciences and builds on constructivist perspectives in social inquiry. The “discursive” approach pays particular attention to the subjectivity of actors; the forms of knowledge these actors assemble; and, in particular, the multiple interpretations they deploy to create meaning. This chapter presents three aspects: the basic acknowledgment that policy is about political argumentation, that argumentation is a deep epistemological issue that changes mainstream objectivism, and that argumentation requires placing interpretation and emotion back into the research agenda.

Between the individual and the collective: understanding the tensions of the interpretive inquiry. A response to Boswell and Corbett

This article reacts on the reflection of the impressionistic character of interpretive research, as opposed to the ‘systematic character’ by John Boswell and Jack Corbett. By returning to ‘intersubjectivity’, the key notion of interpretation that has substantially framed the analytical apparatus of interpretive inquiry, I show that both impressionism and system can and should be embraced in interpretive inquiry, because they mirror the tension between the individual and the collective dimensions of meaning production.

Framing policy designs through contradictory emotions: The case of Czech single mothers

In public policy scholarship on policy design, emotions are still treated as opposed to goals, and their presence is assumed to signal that things have gone wrong. We argue, however, that understanding how and for whom emotions matter is vital to the dynamics of policy designs because emotions are central to the capacity building of policy intermediaries and, with that, to the success of public policies. We examine the case of Czech single mothers in their role as intermediaries in ‘alimony policy’. Our interpretive survey provided single mothers an opportunity to express the way they experience the policy emotionally. The analysis reveals that the policy goal of the child’s well-being is produced at the cost of the mother’s emotional tensions and that policy designs defuse these emotional tensions, implicitly. These contradictory emotions expressed by mothers show us a gateway to problematising policy designs in a novel way, which reconsiders construing policy design as a technical, solution-oriented enterprise to one in which emotional tensions intervene in policy design and are essential for succeeding.

Societies in conflict: experts, publics and democracy. The 8th International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis, Vienna, July 2013

In looking back to the Eighth Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) Conference, which was entitled ‘Societies in Conflict: Experts, Public and Democracy’, we are confronted by manifold emotions. We recall a time full of organizational work that finally led to those three days of intellectual encounter at the beginning of July 2013. And at the same time, we remember our mentor Herbert Gottweis, as it was the last conference that we organized together. As Herbert Gottweis stated in his welcome speech, the IPA conferences had developed from relatively small meetings more resembling workshops than conferences into meetings with several hundred people. From the initial meeting at the University of Birmingham, in 2006, where 40 or 50 participants had engaged in interpretive approaches to policy-making and analysis, we had reached a point where we were welcoming over 420 participants from more than 30 countries to the IPA 2013 Conference in Vienna. When the conferences began one could be sure of meeting everyone in the IPA community who was attending; and the Eighth Conference, while attracting much larger numbers, still managed to keep the intimate and friendly climate that the IPA community had come to expect. Yet again, the conference proved a place for lively conversations and interactions between a number of disciplines, such as policy studies, science studies, women’s studies and cultural studies. When we decided to host the conference in Vienna, there was one aim we were all certain of: we wanted to strengthen the interdisciplinary discussions circling around the intersections between the various definitions of interpretive policy analysis that we had been witnessing during the previous decade of rapidly emerging approaches (see, for example, the discussion in Durnova and Zittoun 2013 or in Wagenaar 2011) and to explicitly confront them with theoretical developments and discussions within science and technology studies (STS), which we saw as a broad, interdisciplinary field of its own. The reasons for focusing on such a dialogue were not only personal, resulting from the fact that with Herbert Gottweis, we situated our research at this intersection. STS’ use interpretive techniques, and rearticulate them – be it along the question of materiality or boundary objects, or through a critique of the concept of discourse as being too linked to ‘texts’ (Høyer 2002, Jasanoff 2005 or Law and Singleton 2014, Bijker et al. 2012, Dear 2001). Some interpretive scholars have engaged with the influence of the poststructuralist paradigm (Law 2008 or West 2011). Some have been criticized by Foucault-inspired poststructuralist, for missing the explicit link between power and knowledge (Gottweis 1998, Glynos and Howarth 2008, or the discussion of interpretive approaches in Wagenaar 2011). Furthermore, critique and extensions have emerged inside interpretive approaches by engaging with diverse traditions (Colebatch 2009, Fischer and Gottweis 2012 or Turnbull 2006). Through this complex dialogue, we wanted to foster the increased investigation of the very notion of ‘politics’ that has gone beyond institutional, national or discursive encounters as we have known them. Therefore, the intersection of policy analysis with STS at the Critical Policy Studies, 2014 Vol. 8, No. 4, 375–378, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2014.957044

Lu et écrit chez Henri Michaux

The work of Henri Michaux still represents a rich source of inspiration for both critics and readers. The paper focuses on the hermeneutic aspect of the double dimension of the voice; the transcribed one that emerges as the lyric subject in the text and the physical one that occurs during the act of reading. On example of use of the female lyric subject in the poem “La Ralentie,”the author tries to present the act of reading as an important dimension of interpretation, caused by what Ricoeur calls “distanciation.”Two versions of the poem are compared: the text of Michaux and its recorded recitation by the actress Germaine Montero. The aim of the paper is to show, how the act of reading can modify the interpretation of the original version, whereas this possibility of more dimensional conceiving is to be understood as one of the main purposes of the Michauxs literary creation in general.