LIST OF PANELS

Context and background Recent interpretive and critical approaches to public policy have increasingly emphasized that policies are not only institutional arrangements or technical instruments, but also experiences lived and mediated by emotions in everyday interactions with the State agents and institutions. Drawing from studies of everyday state interactions and recent debates on emotions in public policy, the workshop approaches public services as spaces where people experience recognition, care, belonging, or humiliation, distrust, indifference, and fear in their encounters with state agents, rules, and procedures. In this perspective, emotions are understood as socially and culturally mediated forces that shape how people interpret the state, citizenship, and their own place in society. Everyday interactions in schools, health services, welfare agencies, police institutions, and digital bureaucracies operate as sites where a “culture of inequalities” is continuously reproduced through micropractices, asymmetrical expectations, symbolic violence, and differentiated forms of recognition. At the same time, these interactions may also produce alternative affective dynamics capable of fostering dignity, trust, reciprocity, and social cohesion. By connecting emotions, lived experiences, and state–society interactions, the workshop seeks to explore how inclusive institutions can challenge entrenched cultures of inequality and create more democratic, caring, and socially responsive forms of public action. Objectives The workshop aims to create a collaborative and reflexive space in which participants will collectively elaborate a practical miniguide with strategies for public sector managers and workers interested in promoting inclusive institutions. Specifically, the workshop seeks to: Analyze how everyday interactions between citizens and public institutions may reproduce inequalities, exclusion, discrimination, and institutional violence. Explore the role of emotions in shaping state–society interactions, how they are interpreted and narrated, reinforcing or challenging cultures of inequality. Examine experiences of inclusive public institutions capable of producing belonging, recognition, and positive affective ties with vulnerable groups. Translate insights from interpretive and critical policy analysis into practical recommendations for inclusive public management. Workshop Dynamics The workshop adopts a strong participatory and interpretive orientation, centered on collective reflection, situated interpretation, and collaborative knowledge production. It will use empirical material from different research projects, carried out by the workshop organizers, as well as draw from the research and professional experiences of the participants. The workshop will be organized into three sequential parts: In the first part, participants will work collectively on interpreting a set of mini-cases portraying everyday interactions between citizens and public institutions in different policy areas. The cases will explore situations involving institutional exclusion, discrimination, bureaucratic indifference, symbolic violence, and unequal treatment. Participants will discuss the cases in small groups and identify the interactional, emotional, organizational, and cultural mechanisms through which inequalities are reproduced in public services. In the second part, participants will analyze the case of Escola dos Meninos e Meninas do Parque (Brasília), a public educational institution widely recognized for its capacity to establish inclusive practices and strong affective bonds with highly vulnerable people. Participants will collectively identify the institutional practices, emotional dynamics, organizational arrangements, and relational strategies that help produce inclusion, recognition, and belonging. The final session will synthesize the discussions into a collective document containing guidelines and practical strategies for fostering inclusive institutions across different policy sectors.

The Biodynamic Medicinal Agroforestry Gardens (Hortos Agroflorestais Medicinais Biodinâmicos – HAMB), created in 2018 in Brazil’s Federal District (DF), emerged as territorial initiatives aimed at integrating health, environment, and care (Moreno et al., 2025). Today, the Network of Biodynamic Medicinal Agroforestry Gardens (RHAMB) comprises 42 units distributed across the seven health regions of the Federal District. In 2025, Administrative Ordinance No. 137 of the Federal District Health Secretariat institutionalized the RHAMB within the State Health Department (Distrito Federal, 2025). The ordinance defines HAMB as technical and care-oriented health facilities dedicated to research, innovation, health and environmental education, strengthening community ties, and promoting comprehensive health. The institutionalization of RHAMB reflects a shift in the way public policies are produced. Territorial agroecological practices developed through bottom-up processes are being recognized and incorporated by the state, revealing an epistemological, political, and ecological transformation in the field of health. Health policies have historically been structured through technical-bureaucratic, centralized approaches strongly influenced by biomedical models, which tend to fragment care and overlook its territorial, cultural, and ecological dimensions (Merhy et al., 2019; Morin, 2007). Grounded in instrumental rationalities, such approaches reduce the complexity of health and illness processes to technical-clinical interventions, limiting the incorporation of knowledge and practices emerging from local territories. In contrast, Agroecology has increasingly established itself as a field that articulates scientific, practical, and political dimensions, proposing a reconfiguration of the relationships among society, nature, and health (Altieri, 2012). More than a set of productive techniques, Agroecology constitutes an epistemological framework that values biodiversity, traditional knowledge, territoriality, and the collective construction of solutions, thereby expanding understandings of care and the production of life (Porto et al., 2014; Shiva, 2003). Within public policy, the incorporation of Agroecology into health remains limited, as healthcare systems continue to be dominated by approaches centered on assistance and medicalization. Nevertheless, recent experiences indicate the emergence of initiatives that connect care, environment, food systems, and social participation, pointing toward broader forms of health production. It is within this context that Administrative Ordinance No. 137/2025 of the Federal District Health Secretariat established the Network of Biodynamic Medicinal Agroforestry Gardens (RHAMB) (Distrito Federal, 2025). By recognizing agroforestry gardens as spaces of care and explicitly incorporating principles of agroecology, social participation, and the valorization of local knowledge, the ordinance introduces elements that challenge the prevailing biomedical and technical-bureaucratic rationality of health policy. The overall objective of this workshop is to share and gather feedback on the RHAMB experience as a form of insurgent democracy, while reflecting on how processes of this nature can become embedded within public policies. Participants are especially encouraged to share experiences that resonate with this perspective or that provide insights into the institutionalization of community-based and territorial initiatives. Guiding questions: How can initiatives that emerge from local territories achieve scale while preserving their community roots when institutionalized as public policy? How can community participation within SUS be strengthened to foster cultures of care at the territorial level? What challenges and opportunities arise in the articulation between community initiatives, public institutions, and democratic processes of social transformation?

Critical policy studies have examined how public policies construct problems, classify target populations, distribute recognition, and define state intervention. Much of this debate uses the language of invisibility: populations the state fails to see, experiences that do not become policy problems, and forms of suffering outside official categories. This workshop proposes a complementary displacement. In many policy fields, marginalized groups are not simply invisible. They are intensely visible through colonial regimes of classification, surveillance, eligibility, suspicion, vulnerability, risk, and dependency. Building on the concepts of coloniality of public policies and tutelary emancipations (Brasil, 2025, 2026), the workshop asks what changes when the body becomes central to policy analysis. Public policies do not only distribute resources or respond to predefined social problems. They classify, discipline, protect, expose, monitor, and correct bodies, defining which ones become recognizable as vulnerable, threatening, productive, dependent, governable, or disposable. From social assistance to migration policy, from policing to health care, from education to digital government, policies materialize in bodily experiences of waiting, inspection, documentation, humiliation, care, fear, exhaustion, and conditional recognition. The category of tutelary emancipations is useful because many contemporary policies promise inclusion, autonomy, citizenship, or protection while requiring continuous proof of adequacy, compliance, deservingness, and institutional legibility. This contradiction is not merely a design failure. It reveals a deeper rationality through which the state recognizes subjects while keeping them administratively dependent. The workshop therefore moves from the abstract target population to the embodied subject of policy, examining how coloniality persists not only in narratives or institutional designs, but also in the production of governable bodies. General Objectives The workshop has three objectives. First, it moves from state invisibility to colonial visibility, asking how marginalized bodies become legible to the state. Second, it connects embodiment to critical policy analysis by examining how policy categories, eligibility criteria, implementation practices, and evaluation regimes produce embodied effects. Third, it explores how decolonial perspectives from Latin America and the Global South can reframe policy analysis beyond technocratic or institution-centered approaches. The framework of coloniality in public policies, especially its epistemic, institutional, territorial, and subjective dimensions, will guide the discussion. Research Questions The central question is: how do public policies that promise inclusion, protection, or emancipation produce bodies that are simultaneously recognized, monitored, corrected, and governed? The workshop will address: what bodies do public policies produce, protect, discipline, or expose? How do categories such as vulnerability, risk, dependency, informality, illegality, disability, deservingness, or exclusion become attached to concrete bodies? How do bureaucratic encounters, registries, conditionalities, biometric systems, and street-level practices materialize policy power? In what ways does coloniality distinguish bodies that govern from bodies that are governed? Scientific Relevance This workshop contributes to critical policy studies by bringing embodiment into the center of policy inquiry. Although embodiment appears in feminist theory, critical race studies, disability studies, migration studies, health research, and anthropology of the state, it remains underdeveloped as a systematic lens for public policy analysis. The workshop treats the body not as a secondary effect of policy, but as one of the primary sites where policy becomes real. The proposal is particularly relevant for an IPA conference in Brazil. In Latin America, public policies have historically been shaped by colonial hierarchies of race, class, gender, territory, and knowledge. These hierarchies are inscribed in bodies through policing, social assistance, maternal responsibility, urban segregation, racialized suspicion, territorial stigma, health inequalities, and bureaucratic exposure. By connecting coloniality, tutelary emancipation, corporeality, and critical reflexivity, the workshop invites scholars to examine not only what counts as a public problem, but whose bodies count as objects of concern, correction, protection, or control.

The intensification of climate change and the persistence of environmental crimes constitute some of the greatest contemporary challenges for States and societies on a global scale. Extreme events, such as prolonged droughts, floods, forest fires, and landslides, combine with environmental degradation processes resulting from deforestation, predatory mining, contamination of natural resources, and other forms of unsustainable exploitation of territories. The impacts of these dynamics fall particularly severely on rural areas, affecting ecosystems, production systems, infrastructure, food security, livelihoods, and the social reproduction of local communities. Although debates on climate adaptation and sustainability have advanced significantly in recent decades, important challenges remain related to the capacity of States to prevent damage, respond to emergencies, and promote effective socio-environmental repair processes. In many contexts, public actions remain fragmented, sectoral, and limited by institutional, financial, and political constraints, hindering the construction of integrated responses capable of articulating environmental recovery, social justice, and sustainable territorial development. This workshop starts from the understanding that repairing the damage resulting from catastrophes, environmental crimes, and climate emergencies in general is much more costly than anticipating these events and should not be understood merely as a technical process of infrastructure reconstruction or ecosystem recovery. It is a complex agenda of territorial transformation that involves multi-level governance, social participation, institutional strengthening, guaranteeing rights, and building more resilient and sustainable development pathways. From this perspective, the creation and strengthening of state capacities become central elements for promoting reparation processes capable of addressing historical inequalities and expanding development opportunities in the affected territories. The proposal is based on an interdisciplinary approach that articulates the fields of public policies, environmental governance, rural territorial development, socio-environmental justice, climate adaptation, and food and nutritional sovereignty and security. In addition, it is inspired by principles of critical pedagogy, understanding participants not only as recipients of knowledge but as subjects who produce knowledge and experiences. In this sense, the workshop aims to foster dialogic learning processes and collective reflection on the challenges faced by different territories, valuing both academic knowledge and knowledge produced by communities, social movements, and public managers involved in reparation and reconstruction processes. Recognizing that the impacts of environmental crimes and climate emergencies are socially differentiated and territorially distributed unevenly, the activity will seek to promote a critical analysis of the relationships between vulnerability, power, institutional capacity, and development. We will discuss how different institutional arrangements can strengthen States' capacity to coordinate anticipatory and reparative intersectoral actions, mobilize resources, promote social participation, and implement policies oriented toward sustainability and territorial justice.

Gestão Social constitutes an interdisciplinary field developed in Brazil through the articulation of participation, collective deliberation, emancipation, and the democratic construction of the public sphere. Although it dialogues with Latin American traditions of social participation, popular education, associativism, and deliberative democracy, the concept acquired distinctive characteristics in Brazil, becoming a singular theoretical-methodological construct within the field of applied social sciences. Its institutional development intensified from the 1990s onward, especially with the creation of the Gestão Social Studies Program at the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (PEGS/EBAPE-FGV). Since then, the field has expanded significantly, currently encompassing scientific journals that include Gestão Social within their scopes — and, in some cases, even in their titles — as well as the consolidation of national and international academic networks. Brazil currently has the Brazilian Network of Gestão Social Researchers (RGS), as well as the Latin American Network of Gestão Social Researchers (RELAGS), in addition to regular scientific events dedicated to the theme. The National Meeting of Gestão Social Researchers (ENAPEGS) will reach its 14th edition in May 2027, in Campina Grande, Paraíba, Brazil. Two Latin American meetings have already been held, respectively in Ecuador and Colombia. Despite this institutional and theoretical advancement, Gestão Social still faces important challenges related to its epistemological, methodological, and international consolidation. Questions concerning the conceptual delimitation of the field, the empirical operationalization of participation, the scalability of deliberative processes, and the impacts of digital technologies and artificial intelligence on the public sphere remain open. This workshop proposes a space for collective debate on the trajectory of Gestão Social in Brazil, its conceptual evolution, and the contemporary challenges for its future consolidation. The activity seeks to bring together researchers, students, and professionals interested in participation, democracy, public policies, territorial governance, cooperativism, social movements, and deliberative processes. It is expected to: strengthen national and international research networks in Gestão Social; expand interdisciplinary dialogue on participation and democracy; contribute to the theoretical and methodological consolidation of the field; stimulate new research agendas; identify experiences in which Gestão Social may be present, potentially constituting spaces for future research; produce collective reflections on the future challenges of Gestão Social in contemporary contexts marked by digital transformation and democratic crises. PS: Note that the Brazilian concept of Gestão Social has been translated into English as Social Management and, in some cases, Social Administration. However, the original concept encompasses broader dimensions related to collective deliberation, democratic participation, emancipation, and the co-construction of the public sphere.

General Objectives, Research Questions and Scientific Relevance After the 2008 financial crisis, backlash against globalization and liberal values emerged as neoliberalism deepened inequalities. Instead of challenging market logic “tout court”, this backlash fueled illiberal and neo-nationalist neoliberalism, fusing libertarian economics with religious and moral conservatism, for example. In policymaking, this combination drives moral and cultural reaction and pro-market restructuring across countries such as the Americas, Hungary, Poland, and India, rolling back environmental regulation, attacking civil and women’s rights, and weakening labor protections. It also selectively reshapes globalization via tariffs, sanctions, and geopolitical pressure to strengthen corporate power and reorganize economic integration. This section’s main themes are geoeconomics, reactionary neoliberalism, dismantling public policy, implications for social policy, and global integration enmeshed in the political role of religion. Against this backdrop, we welcome papers examining: Geoeconomics as a strategy for restructuring globalization and reinforcing corporate power; The dismantling of public policies through illiberal backlash, neo-nationalist conservatism, and ultra-libertarian ideology; Implications for social policy, development, and new forms of global economic integration; and The political role of religious actors advancing illiberal neoliberal agendas.

We are currently witnessing a moment of profound social, economic and political transformation on a global scale involving struggles over how to address urgent issues such as climate change and other environmental disasters with serious implications for (re)ordering society (Dodge 2024; Fischer, 2017; Lindvall, Karlsson, 2024; Machin, 2022; Schlosberg et al., 2025). In both global and more-proximate contexts (national, subnational, and local), environmental concerns are caught up in these broader transformations, becoming the basis for broader political choices to be articulated, created, formed and reformed. This panel will focus especially on two dynamically intertwined but apparent oppositions in the current historical moment, in order to understand environmental inequities such as racism, xenophobia, anti-indigeneity/colonialism and their intersections, as well as the possibilities for changing 1) policy meanings (frames, discourses, narratives, and so on) and 2) governance practices and patterns (collaboration, contestation, deliberation, and so on). This panel gives priority to how meanings and governance practices on environmental policy emerge from groups – such as coalitions, social movements, and alternative communities – in specific, contextualized struggles who are often exposed to environmental inequities, while also paying attention to the ways in which those inequities are created in the first place (through domination in governance arrangements and public policy designs). We are seeing robust discussions of alternative policy and governance modes (e.g., green democracy, sustainability transitions) but also strong pressures to retain neoliberalism or an even stronger “gilded age” or authoritarianism (e.g., Trump in the US, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Orban in Hungary). These are responses to the world’s crises with profound implications for the way we understand environmental issues. Specifically, the panel identifies two dynamics that are intertwined despite their apparent opposition in the current historical moment. It also suggests ways in which these dynamics are at work to reconfigure environmental policy meanings and forms of governance. First, there is an apparent opposition of environmental politics as a distinct policy domain, on one hand, and second, broader struggles against structural domination (such as racism, colonialism, xenophobia, and patriarchy), on the other, but which, in political practice are deeply interconnected. That is, if we accept that environmental problems are deeply embedded in broader structures of domination, we can view the tensions between these agendas in political practice alongside their deep interconnections in the lived experiences of populations affected by environmental degradation. Recognizing these as interconnected raises a series of important areas of inquiry. For instance, some framings of environmental problems can sometimes hide wider dynamics of domination, allowing policy responses that go far enough to address immediate harms but do not challenge the underlying structures that produce them. However, the opposite risk also exists: when environmental struggles are fully absorbed into broader agendas concerning racism, colonialism, or economic justice, the specificity of environmental politics can disappear. This creates strategic and interpretive tensions for movements and policy actors alike. Furthermore, these apparent oppositions – which are practically intertwined in practice – may illuminate questions related to evolving environmental meanings and environmental governance, as well as related political dilemmas faced by environmental movements as they build coalitions and establish narratives within changing societies. First, environmental meaning may be redefined as environmental problems are reinterpreted through broader struggles against domination. These processes are generally contested, as groups with lived experiences of environmental inequities or injustices form discourses and actions on climate and other environmental issues based on their lived experiences. They also confront desires to “return” to an imagined past, to (re)create existing power relations and forms of business/energy production that perpetuate inequities and anti-democratic forces. While problematizations are central concerns in interpretive policy analysis (Durnová, 2022; Yanow, 2007; Wagenaar, 2015), policy meanings can go well beyond this to inform identities, relationships, solutions, interests, and ideas related to different notions of sustainability, vulnerability-resistance, and so on (Zittoun et al., in press; Veloso et al, 2025; Mendonça et al, 2024). We are interested in what meanings are at the heart of controversies on environmental issues in the context of profound transformations. Scholars have identified genuine conflicts between climate justice and technocratic and market-oriented approaches to climate policy (Basseches et al. 2022) and other divisions across coalitions in environmental politics (Bulkeley 2000; Dodge & Metze, 2017; Dodge & Lee, 2017; Metze & Dodge, 2016). However, the debate in practice has deep roots and raises questions about whether societies should leave power structures intact or seek to entrench and concentrate power among the already powerful, on one hand, or define new democratic forms of organization that transform power in ways better equipped to deal with emerging environmental (and other social and economic) problems, on the other hand. For instance, while environmental justice has become a major discourse on environmental policy issues, including climate change, it is also being profoundly undermined in some circumstances. In the US, for instance, at the federal level , regressive forces are seeking to reestablish environmentally harmful practices and powers, despite states making strides on environmental justice policy. In Brazil and in Latin America, similar tensions are visible, particularly in conflicts surrounding authoritarianism, extractivism, deforestation, and Indigenous territorial rights (Svampa, 2019; Gudynas, 2021; Motta and Hauber, 2023). Second, the organization of environmental action through broader political coalitions and movements may lead to changes in governance. There are certain modes of governance that exist and are evolving to address environmental issues, sometimes directly addressing inequities or in other cases creating them – and emergent forms of governance coming out of different movements and organizing. We do not equate governance with government, but see governance as having important societal aspects in which collective environmental work is carried out outside of the confines of governmental action (Fischer 2017), where policy ideas are nurtured and also demanded (Audet, 2013; Dodge 2017; Hall & Talpin, 2010). These considerations suggest broader questions about the meaning of public policy and governance and its location: Where policy is made? Who participates in its production? And what risks do they assume as they mediate institutional contexts and lived experience? We invite papers that address the current tensions in environmental policy making during this period of profound economic, social, and political transformation, during which environmental issues are being (re)defined within a broader concern for societal and environmental governance transformation. References: Audet, R. (2013). Climate justice and bargaining coalitions: a discourse analysis. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 13(3), 369-386. Basseches, J. A., Bromley-Trujillo, R., Boykoff, M. T., Culhane, T., Hall, G., Healy, N., ... & Stephens, J. C. (2022). Climate policy conflict in the US states: a critical review and way forward. Climatic Change, 170(3), 32. Bulkeley, H. (2000). Discourse coalitions and the Australian climate change policy network. Environment and Planning C: Government and policy, 18(6), 727-748. Dodge, J. & Metze, T. (2017). Hydraulic fracturing as an interpretive problem: lessons on energy controversies in Europe and the US. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 19(1), 1-13. Dodge, J. (2017). Crowded advocacy: Framing dynamics in the fracking controversy in New York. Voluntas, 28(3), 888-915. Dodge, J. (2024). Exploring counter hegemony and action research to address the climate crisis, Critical Policy Studies, 18(3), 514-524. Dodge, J., & Lee, J.* (2017). Framing dynamics and policy gridlock: the curious case of hydraulic fracturing in New York. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 19(1), 14-34. Durnová, A. (2022). Making interpretive policy analysis critical and societally relevant: emotions, ethnography and language. Policy & Politics, 50(1), 43-58. Fischer, F. (2017). Climate crisis and the democratic prospect: Participatory governance in sustainable communities. Oxford University Press. Gudynas, E. (2021). Extractivisms: Politics, Economy and Ecology. Fernwood Publishing. Hall, N. L., & Taplin, R. (2010). Environmental nonprofit campaigns and state competition: Influences on climate policy in California. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 21(1), 62-81. Lindvall, D., & Karlsson, M. (2024). Exploring the democracy-climate nexus: a review of correlations between democracy and climate policy performance. Climate Policy, 24(1), 87-103. Machin, A. (2022). Climates of democracy: Skeptical, rational, and radical imaginaries. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 13(4), e774. Mendonça, R. F., Veloso, L. H. N., Magalhães, B. D., & Motta, F. M. (2024). Deliberative ecologies: A relational critique of deliberative systems. European Political Science Review, 16(3), 333-350. Metze, T. & Dodge, J. (2016). Dynamic discourse coalitions on hydro-fracking in Europe and the United States. Environmental Communication, 10(3), 365-379. Motta, F., & Hauber, G. (2023). Anti-environmentalism and proto-authoritarian populism in Brazil: Bolsonaro and the defence of global agri-business. Environmental Politics, 32(4), 642–662. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2022.2123993 Schlosberg, D., Rickards, L., Pearse, R., Della Bosca, H., & Moraes, O. (2025). Critical environmental justice in contemporary scholarship and movements: consensus and plurality of the discourse. Environmental Politics, 34(3), 399-420. Svampa, M. (2019). Neo-extractivism in Latin America: Socio-environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Veloso, L., Curato, N., Ross, M., & Morán, A. (2025). Vulnerability is not a checklist: Grounded normative theory in global deliberation. Qualitative Research, 14687941251341997. Wagenaar, H. (2015). Transforming perspectives: The critical functions of interpretive policy analysis. In Handbook of critical policy studies (pp. 422-440). Edward Elgar Publishing. Yanow, D. (2007). Interpretation in policy analysis: On methods and practice. Critical policy analysis, 1(1), 110-122. Zittoun, P., Ansell, C. Hassenteufel, P. & Dodge, J. (2026). The policy transaction perspective: A new pragmatist approach to policy processes. In B.G. Peters and P. Zittoun (Eds.), Contemporary approaches to public policy: Theories, controversies, perspectives (2nd ed). Palgrave Macmillan.

While comparative studies between Portugal and Brazil have long explored areas such as education and migration, the critical-interpretive analysis of science funding remains an underdeveloped frontier. Existing literature on scientific policy within the Lusophone space is predominantly quantitative or descriptive, focusing on budgetary allocations and diplomatic cooperation. This panel breaks new ground by treating funding not as a neutral resource or a mere technical output, but as a contested site of meaning-making where the very value of knowledge is negotiated. The panel’s core innovation lies in its application of a cutting-edge tripartite heuristic—Discourse, Framing, and Narrative—as a holistic framework for contemporary Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA). By moving beyond isolated methodological approaches, we provide a multidimensional view of how power, strategy, and sensemaking converge. This framework allows for a unique exploration of how Lusophone scientific identities negotiate their space against the dominant, English-centric metrics and traditional power structures, capturing both the macro-discursive structures that discipline research and the micro-interactional “plots” of those who navigate them. Our primary objective is to move beyond technocratic evaluations of budgets to deconstruct the “regimes of truth” that dictate which knowledge is considered “investable.” We welcome papers that explore how power is embedded in the language of funding agencies (such as FCT, CNPq, and CAPES), how specific scientific priorities are “foregrounded” while others are silenced, and how storytellers—from policymakers to precarious researchers—emplot the future of science. By bridging actor-focused and structure-focused analyses, this panel aims to renew critical dialogue on how the Lusophone identity can challenge, resist, or adapt to global scientific hegemonies. In alignment with the conference theme, “Interpretive Policy Analysis Community: Renewing Critical Dialogue, Building Connections,” this panel seeks to revitalise the study of science policy by challenging the positivist bias that often dominates the field. By bringing together scholars from the Lusophone world and researchers from across the globe, we aim to build connections that transcend the North-South divide. This cross-pollination of perspectives will link political science, the sociology of knowledge, and discourse studies, creating a vibrant network of critical policy researchers dedicated to reimagining science funding as a tool for social equity and democratic participation worldwide. References: I. Core Heuristic Van Hulst, M., Metze, T., Dewulf, A., de Vries, J., van Bommel, S., & van Ostaijen, M. (2025). “Discourse, framing and narrative: three ways of doing critical, interpretive policy analysis.” Critical Policy Studies, 19(1), 74-96. II. Foundations of Interpretive Policy Analysis Fischer, F., & Forester, J. (1993). The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. Duke University Press. Yanow, D. (2000). Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis. Sage. Wagenaar, H. (2011). Meaning in Action: Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis. M.E. Sharpe. III. Theory-Specific References Hajer, M. A. (1995). The Politics of Environmental Discourse. Oxford University Press. Schön, D. A., & Rein, M. (1994). Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies. Basic Books. Stone, D. A. (1997). Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. Norton. IV. Science Policy, Power, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge Jasanoff, S. (2004). States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order. Routledge. Vessuri, H., Guédon, J. C., & Cetto, A. M. (2014). “Excellence or quality? Impact of the current competition regime on science and scientific publishing in Latin America and its implications for development.” Current Sociology, 62(5), 647-665. V. Lusophone and Developing Contexts Madeira, A. I. (2010). “Portuguese, a language of science?” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences. Arvanitis, R., & Gaillard, J. (Eds.). (1992). Science and Technology Policy in Developing Countries.

In the post-COVID era, the principles and practices of democracy have increasingly been under attack. More authoritarian populist leaders around the globe have been emboldened to exercise their power in destructive ways (Smith-Carrier et al. 2025), putting the very existence of all species and the planet at risk. Such leaders, and the wealthy global elite who sustain them, are continuously reshaping the global order and social relations in the interests of capital. Private actors are extracting ever-greater volumes of the Earth’s finite resources, with the profits of these enterprises hoarded by an infinitesimally small assemblage of the ultra-rich (Oxfam 2026). Deeply enmeshed in neoliberal orthodoxy, including fiscal austerity, social welfare retrenchment, and privatization (Smith-Carrier and Dionne, In Press), people around the world are subject to intensifying levels of poverty and hunger (Hickel et al. 2025). Populism often thrives by framing society as divided into opposing groups, typically the "pure people" versus a corrupt elite or marginalized others. This dynamic intensifies conflicts over who is considered as belonging or not. While "the rise in authoritarianism means policy inquiry cannot take liberal democracy for granted" (Dodge 2025, 167), we aim to discuss research that seeks to address social injustice by fostering dialogue within oppressed communities—enhancing their awareness, self-esteem, and capacity to draw on their own knowledge in relation to dominant powers and interests (cf. Bartels and Wittmayer 2018). This panel aims to consider how frequently silenced voices can be amplified in the struggle for human rights, social justice, and a more equitable and sustainable world. Presentations that highlight how interpretive policy analysis (IPA) can be used to advance insurgent democratic experiences, promote resistance and solidarity, and mobilize social movements are welcomed. Addressing current crises effectively and sustainably requires us to critically consider not only the kinds and purposes of the knowledge we seek, but also the underlying research approaches used to produce it (cf. Bartels and Wittmayer 2018). The panel’s overarching question explores how interpretivism, grounded in reflexivity and emphasizing meaning, context, and lived experience, is particularly well equipped to challenge and disrupt power dynamics and foster alliances in the field (Bliesemann de Guevara and Ridden 2025, 20). Moreover, it seeks to probe how the support of local knowledge and situated research allows for a decolonial approach that challenges how academic knowledge production privileges Global North knowledge (Boullosa 2026; Einfeld and Sullivan, 2025). References Bartels, Koen PR, and Julia M. Wittmayer. 2018. ‘Introduction: Action Research in Policy Analysis and Transition Research’. In Action Research in Policy Analysis, 1–18. Routledge. Bevins, Vincent. 2023, October 10. ‘The Mass Protest Decade: Why Did the Street Movements of the 2010s Fail?’ The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/10/the-mass-protest-decade-why-did-the-street-movements-of-the-2010s-fail Bliesemann de Guevara, Berit, and Louise Ridden. 2025. ‘Doing Fieldwork in Interpretive Research: Encounters Online, Offline, and in the Spaces in-Between’. In How to Conduct Interpretive Research, edited by Colette Einfeld and Helen Sullivan, 16–31. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035313990.00008. Boullosa, Rosana de Freitas. 2026. ‘On Domesticated Hybrids and Misplaced Dialogues: Troubles with Positivist Legacies’. Critical Policy Studies 20 (1): 165–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2026.2616475. Braun, Kathrin, and Jennifer Dodge. 2018. ‘Critical Policy Studies and the Politics of Post-truth Politics‘. Critical Policy Studies 12 (1): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2018.1444498 Di Ronco, Anna, and Rossella Selmini. 2024. ‘Criminalising Dissent: Key Themes and Emerging Trends’. In Criminalisation of Dissent in Times of Crisis: Critical Criminological Perspectives, edited by Anna Di Ronco, and Rossella Selmini, 1–16. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-75376-3_1 Dodge, Jennifer. 2025. ‘Enlivening a Strategic Focus for a Stable Democracy amidst Authoritarian Threats: Is Lasswell Enough?’ Critical Policy Studies 19 (1): 166–169. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2025.2456143. Einfeld, Colette, and Helen Sullivan. 2025. ‘Introduction to How to Conduct Interpretive Research’. In How to Conduct Interpretive Research, edited by Colette Einfeld and Helen Sullivan, 1–15. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035313990.00007. Hickel, Jason, Dylan Sullivan, and Michail Moatsos. 2025, August 18. ‘Has Extreme Poverty Really Plunged Since the 1980s? New Analysis Suggests Not’. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/has-extreme-poverty-really-plunged-since-the-1980s-new-analysis-suggests-not-261144 Matlosa, Khabele. 2023. ‘Global Trends and Impact of Democratic Recession: Hard Choices for the Global South’. South African Journal of International Affairs 30 (3): 337–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/10220461.2023.2269149 Oxfam. 2026, January 19. ‘Billionaire Wealth Jumps Three Times Faster in 2025 to Highest Peak Ever, Sparking Dangerous Political Inequality’. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-wealth-jumps-three-times-faster-2025-highest-peak-ever-sparking Schmidt, Vivien A, and Mark Thatcher. ‘Why are Neoliberal Ideas So Resilient in Europe’s Political Economy?’ Critical Policy Studies 8 (3): 340–347. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2014.926826 Smith-Carrier, Tracy, and Jasmine Dionne. In Press. ‘Correcting Course’ on the ‘Reversals of Fortune’? A Critical Discourse Analysis of the World Bank’s Ongoing Development Project’. Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research. Smith-Carrier, Tracy, Regine Paul, and Rosana de Freitas Boullosa. 2025. ‘Departing From All Semblance of Democracy: How Scholarly Communities Can Respond to the Rise of Oligarchy and Authoritarianism’. Critical Policy Studies 19 (2): 179–182. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2025.2499000 World Economic Forum. 2026, January 20. ‘Davos 2026: Special Address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada’. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

Climate crisis and the search for environmental sustainability constitute the primary challenge of our century (Klein 2914; Beck 1986; Fischer 2017). Despite all of the rhetoric about the need to deal with the coming crisis, the actions thus have fallen far short of that which is needed to put humanity on a sustainable course. Most of the efforts have focused on attempts to find scientific technological market-oriented solutions, particularly known as as “technical fixes.” The pursuit of sustainability has thus been largely dominated by demands for scientific expertise and economic-oriented policy solutions. As a result, this global challenge is framed and interpreted mainly as a technical problem to be addressed through elite discourses, neoliberal market instruments, and professional expertise. This has largely taken place at the expense of democratic environmental policymaking and citizen involvement, despite the fact that from early on the sustainability literature and key documents have presented broad citizens participation as an essential component for achieving sustainable goals. Underlying this reluctance to involve ordinary citizens, however, is the belief, often more latent than manifest, that the citizenry is not up to the task (Shearman and Smith 2007). Citizens are not intelligent and rational enough to be trusted with the challenge. But there is good evidence that citizens can help to put us on a path to sustainability. Indeed, the goal of this volume is to present a representation of deliberative participatory projects, both inside and outside governance processes that serve to demonstrate this point. Most are not well known, but they are impressive models for helping to bring about an environmentally sustainable societal system. The objective of this panel is to not only make them known, but to draw out the lessons they offer for governing a democratically just sustainable future. We ask here why there been such limited citizen participation in environmental policy politics given its importance? Among a myriad of explanations, one is the failure to actively engage the general citizenry. This represents a retreat form the earlier environment movement, which started as a citizens movement (Dobson, 2003). Although the modern environmentalism started in the 1960s with street protests by concerned citizens, and the formation of grass-roots environmental organizations, the focus in the subsequent decades saw a shift from citizens to an emphasis on science and technical information, giving rise to a more technocratic approach to policymaking (Baker, 2022). Despite the fact that the landmark documents spelling out sustainability called for citizen engagement, environmental governance moved from public arenas for political protest to the administrative technical realm of science and policy expertise (Luke, 1999). Nonetheless, numerous environmental academics and activists still maintain that democracy has to be an important part of environmental policy and governance (Fischer 2000). More than a few even see participatory democracy involving an active citizenry as an essential part of the challenge. Some even formulate this in terms of the concept of “environmental” or ecological democracy,” referring to the idea or principle that citizens should have equal rights to meaningfully participate in environmental decisions that affect their lives (Mason, 1999; Morrison, 1995). Against this backdrop, we seek a new interpretation of sustainability. Rather than treating it as a purely technical issue, sustainability can be understood as part of a broader civic struggle to shape and influence environmental policymaking. From civic environmentalism to social movements and beyond, empowered citizens are capable of engaging meaningfully in democratic policy deliberation in pursuit of sustainable futures. References Baker, S. (2022). “Sustainable Development: Between Reformist Change and Radical Transformation”. In Bornemann, B., Knappe, H. and Nanz, P., eds. Routledge Handbook of Democracy and Sustainability. London: Routledge. Beck, U. (1986). Risk society: Toward a new modernity. London: Sage. Bookchin, M. (1996). Toward an Ecological Society. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Boossabong, P., Chamchong, P. and Fischer, F. 2025. “Participatory Policy Deliberation: Interpreting Cultural Policy Through Symbols”. In F. Fischer, D. Torgerson, and S. Münch (Eds.), Handbook of Interpretive Policy Analysis. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp.155-169. Bosselmann, K., Engel, R. and Taylor, P. (2008). Governance for Sustainability – Issues, Challenges, Successes. IUCN, Gland, Switzerland. xvi. Dobson, A. (2003). Citizenship and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. European Environment Agency (2023). The case for public participation in sustainable transitions. Eea.europe.edu Fischer, F., & Boossabong, P. (2018). Deliberative policy analysis: The case of Khon Kaen. In A. Bachtiger, J. Dryzek, J. S. Mansbridge, J. & Warren, M. (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dryzek, J. S., Norgaard, R. B. and Schlosberg, D. (eds.) (2011). The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press Fischer, F. (2017). Climate crisis and democratic prospect: Participatory governance in sustainable communities. Oxford: Oxford University. Press. Fischer, F. (2000). Citizens, experts and the environment: The politics of local knowledge. Duke University Press. Fung, A. and Wright, E.O., (2003). Deep democracy: Institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance. New York: Verso Publisher. Klein, N. (2014). This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. New York: Simon and Schuster. Luke, T. W. (1999). “Eco-Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation,” in F. Fischer and M. Hajer (eds.), Living with Nature: Environmental Politics as Cultural Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 103–20. Morrison, R. (1995). Ecological Democracy. Boston, MA: South End Press. Mason, M. (1999). Environmental Democracy. London: Earthscan. Rist, S., Chidambaranathan, M., Escobar, C., Wiesmann, U., Zimmermann, N. (2007). “Moving from sustainable management to sustainable governance of natural resources: The role of social learning processes in rural India, Bolivia and Mali.” Journal of Rural Studies 23 (1): 23-37. Shearman, D. and Smith, J. W. (2007). The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing United Nation. (2021). The 5Ps of the Sustainable Development Goals. Retrieved from: https:// www. unescwa. org /sites/ default/ files/inline-files/ the_ 5 ps_of_the_sustainable_ development_goals.pdf World Commission on Environment and Development (1987). Our Common Future. Retrieved from: http://www.un-documents.net/wced ocf.htm

As a field of study, Critical Policy Studies thrives on exposing power relations in policy processes, foregrounding discourse, interpretation, and social constructions as means of democratizing knowledge generation and collective decision-making amid global and local power surges and deepening inequalities. In our current times, this agenda meets a shrinking democratic space, the rise of authoritarian and oligarchic power, and intensified corporate and techno-political control. CPS must defend interpretive, reflexive inquiry against epistemic capture that sidelines critical methodologies and forms of agency in this new phase of concentrating politico-economic power (de Freitas Boullosa et al. 2023; Paul et al. 2024). In particular, the simultaneous rise of digital imperialism, digital sovereignty projects among state actors across the globe, and weaponized tech races represent an attack on the progressive, participatory and epistemologically pluralist agenda of CPS. Silicon Valley and Chinese Big tech companies reach out across the world in extractivist and exploitative ways, the US and China increasingly weaponize these firms’ geo-economic power (Adams 2024; Srnicek 2026), and middle powers across the globe prioritise digital sovereignty projects (Doshi and Delgado 2025; Monsees and Lambach 2022; Seidl and Schmitz 2023). As a result, policy and governance projects across all scales and levels are increasingly dominated by logics of economic and military competitiveness, revived sovereignty concerns, technocratic and economistic knowledge generation, and desires to control populations through technical means (Cavalcante Silva 2025; Dattani 2023; Paul 2024; Raghunath 2026). Taken together, these dynamics sideline alternative projects of democratic and socio-economic reproduction. From this broad context, several fields of tension emerge for critical policy research and practice: While agency and autonomy are key requirements for emancipatory governance, they also become increasingly nebulous in the digital age. On the one hand, technologies such as AI agents tend to crowd out human decision-making on the ground, on the other hand, strong There Is No Alternative (TINA) discourses of needing to lead, catch-up or benefit from tech races decrease the room for political discussion of policy proposals. What does this double squeeze on agency do to participatory spaces for uttering critique, thinking about progressive alternatives, and enacting emancipatory tech projects in different contexts? What role and scope is there for non-state actors, such as labour unions, social movements, or more marginalised communities to shape tech futures? The imperial logics of technology development and uses in governance projects come with a strong analytical focus on the triad of digital empires (usually meaning: the US, China and perhaps the EU) and the global reach of powerful corporations. While tending to such global hierarchies is important, it also disavows experiences and agency in the majority world (Amrute et al. 2022). The same is true for “lead” technologies, where little attention is paid to smaller community technology projects than to the global reach of products by OpenAI, Meta, Transsion or Huawei. How can we analyse policy and governance in ways which bring together both global dynamics and local articulations of tech capitalism? How are state and non-state actors carving spaces, both small and large-scale, for more autonomy within tech governance? To what extent can attention to the variegated nature of tech markets help identifying pockets of resistance (Mügge et al. 2026)? At the same time, attempts to resist, decenter and decolonise dominant technologies – for example by developing indigenous and non-English Large Language Models – also risk reproducing global hierarchies such as infrastructural dependence on the US and Chinese stacks and integration within a capitalist order. The same is true for “digital sovereignty” claims by states or municipal actors, who often either become yet another imperial producer and exporter of a tech stack within their world region, or reify the imperial power of existing hegemons. How does – and, from a normative viewpoint: how can – policy and governance, social mobilization, and critically-minded knowledge generation contribute to the creation of progressive alternatives? Lastly, there is a tension within emancipatory discourses around digital technology. In Brazil and India, for example, attempts to create alternatives in the development and public sector deployment of technologies such as artificial intelligence draw on promises of sustainability, green growth, or social inclusion (Cavalcante Silva 2025; Parsheera 2024). In Europe, democratic norms and fundamental rights have become the legitimatory underbelly of creating EU-made tech alternatives (Paul 2024). To what extent do such discourses carry the seeds for progressive tech and governance futures vs. reproducing forms of extractivism, capitalist accumulation, and domination? And how do structures of knowledge generation in the complex technology/ policy/governance enable or constrain the emergence of alternative ideas and ideologies? References: Adams, R. (2024) The New Empire of AI: The Future of Global Inequality, Hoboken: Polity Press. Amrute, S., Singh, R. and Guzmán, R. L. (2022) A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World: An Empirical Site and a Standpoint, doi:10.2139/ssrn.4199467. Cavalcante Silva, G. (2025) ‘Articulating AI futures for Brazil: on different regimes of technological solutionism’, Critical Policy Studies 19(4): 637–656. Dattani, K. (2023) ‘Spectrally shape-shifting: biometrics, fintech and the corporate-state in India’, Journal of Cultural Economy 0(0): 1–19. de Freitas Boullosa, R., Paul, R. and Smith-Carrier, T. (2023) ‘Democratizing science is an urgent, collective, and continuous project: expanding the boundaries of critical policy studies’, Critical Policy Studies 17(1): 1–3. Doshi, V. and Delgado, H. E. (2025) ‘Digital Statecraft of Middle Powers: Tech Landscape and Digital Sovereignty in Brazil and India’, in M. Jiang and L. Belli (eds). Digital Sovereignty in the BRICS Countries. Cambridge University Press, pp. 124–147, doi:10.1017/9781009531085.009. Monsees, L. and Lambach, D. (2022) ‘Digital sovereignty, geopolitical imaginaries, and the reproduction of European identity’, European Security 31(3): 377–394. Mügge, D., Paul, R. and Stan, V. (2026) The AI Matrix: Profits, Power, Politics, Newcastle upon Thyne: Agenda Publishing, available at https://www.agendapub.com/page/detail/the-ai-matrix/?k=9781788218597. Parsheera, S. (2024) ‘Stack is the New Black?: Evolution and Outcomes of the “India-Stackification” Process’, Computer Law & Security Review 52: 105947. Paul, R. (2024) ‘European AI “trusted throughout the world”: How risk-based regulation fashions a competitive common market for artificial intelligence’, Regulation & Governance 18(4): 1065–1082. Paul, R., Boullosa, Rosana de Freitas and and Smith-Carrier, T. (2024) ‘With or without X: can journals engage critically on and with social media owned by tech billionaires?’, Critical Policy Studies 18(4): 531–535. Raghunath, P. (ed.) (2026) Critical political economy and southern approaches to AI: a dialogue, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Seidl, T. and Schmitz, L. (2023) ‘Moving on to not fall behind? Technological sovereignty and the “geo-dirigiste” turn in EU industrial policy’, Journal of European Public Policy 1–28. Srnicek, N. (2026) Silicon empires: the fight for the future of AI, Cambridge: Polity Press.

“The authoritative word belongs to those at the top; those at the bottom just provide the input. It’s the same for any knowledge system: we produce the raw material and they give it back to us as a finished product.” - Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui We exist in an era of overlapping, deepening crises. From escalating socio-ecological emergencies to widening structural inequalities, the fundamental question of “what is the true narrative?” is deeply contested. This panel engages with the argument that our source of knowledge must be people living the experience when we do critical interpretive analysis. We follow a longstanding tradition, including the work of Rivera Cusicanqui (2020) and Darder (2015) arguing that critical interpretation must include the empirical knowledge of those disproportionately impacted by a specific struggle. This has important implications for critical interpretive epistemologies, as it requires us to centre subaltern sensibilities (Darder, 2015). Historically, academic institutions have been complicit in extracting knowledge from marginalised communities, establishing dominant epistemologies that dictate how inequality is defined and analysed (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). True democratisation cannot be achieved by merely observing or redistributing oppression; it requires actively dismantling it. This demands a radical shift in how we understand, validate, and produce knowledge. It requires critical interpretive epistemologies. It requires dismantling epistemic supremacy. This panel seeks to explore how we can use critical interpretative epistemologies and methods in our work towards epistemic justice and equity. This is particularly important in realities with deepening inequalities where questions around what observations means, how to frame findings and what counts as valid are increasingly questioned and criticised. In line with work by Darder (2015), we are interested in how critical interpretative methodologies can be used to achieve epistemic equity. Drawing on Carneiro’s (2005) central argument that the hegemonic “being” constructs the marginalised “other” as a “non- being” in order to affirm its own superiority and rationality. This panel’s shared meaning- making methodology is a deliberate act of resistance against the historical treatment of marginalised people as mere “coisas que falam” who lack the capacity to produce culture, development, and valid knowledge. The panel forms part of the work towards epistemic equity by exploring shared struggles and building collective efforts to reclaim resources and narratives. To do so, we welcome contributions that discuss how policy analyses can transform, to actively prevent epistemicide, forge epistemic equity and center marginalised knowledges without appropriating or extracting from them. Contributions might include practical examples from activism and/or community work or academic research. Contributions might also include examples of how critical interpretative methodologies might play a role in creating conditions for shared learning and solidarity building that includes marginalised knowledge. Here, we position ourselves in line with Fischer and Boullosa (2025) who argue that interpretive inquiry requires shared meaning-making, and seek to create a commoning space that shares practices and creates solidarity across communities, fields and boundaries. We see our role as academics in this space is not to speak for these struggles, but to step back, defer to epistemic authorities, facilitate, and help link these lived experiences to broader dimensions of critical interpretive epistemologies. By doing so, we aim to ensure marginalised voices are authentically represented to address the pervasive inequalities inherent in knowledge production itself. Our panel, “Critical Interpretive Epistemologies for the Study of Inequalities“ seeks to Challenge the traditional boundaries of academic knowledge production. Expand work on decolonising epistemology and whose voices are included in critical interpretive epistemologies for the study of inequalities. Encourage critical understanding of what inequality is, and how to analyse it from a critical interpretive and epistemically just approach. Forge transnational solidarity amongst scholars working on epistemic justice. Add to efforts to work towards epistemic equity. References: Carneiro, S. (2005) ‘A Construção do Outro como Não-Ser como fundamento do Ser. ’ PhD Thesis. Universidade de São Paulo. Cusicanqui, S.R. (2022) ‘Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization. ’ Native American and Indigenous Studies, 9(2), pp.135-136. Darder, A. (2018) ‘Decolonizing interpretive research: Subaltern sensibilities and the politics of voice’ . Qualitative Research Journal, 18(2), pp.94-104. Fischer, F. and Boullosa, R. de F. (2025) ‘Participatory action research: Collaborative practices in interpretive inquiry’ , in Fischer, F., Münch, S. and Torgerson, D. (eds) Interpretive Policy An al y s i s . C h el t en h am: E d w ar d E l g ar Pu b l i s h i n g , p p . 221– 238. d o i : 10.4337/9781802202472.00021. Piacentini, T. (2025) ‘Teaching Sociology in Turbulent Times: Ethical Pedagogy and the Politics of the Classroom. ’ Sociology, p.00380385261417961. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.

The analysis of social inequalities is inseparable from understanding the centrality of race in the formation of countries. In this line of reasoning, Mario Theodoro’s work, "A Sociedade Desigual: racismo e branquitude na formação do Brasil" (2022), offers one of the most robust and comprehensive theories in recent years to interpreting the structural and relational bases of racism and racial policy discourses in Brazilian society. He argues that "Brazilian-style" racism, as discussed by Edward Telles (2003), is not a peripheral or residual phenomenon, but a structural element that shapes institutions, social relations, political opportunities, and social patterns of inequality and resource distribution. By analysing dimensions such as the labour market, education, health, and territorial policies, Theodoro demonstrates how these fields have historically operated as mechanisms for the reproduction of racial inequality. This dynamic is expressed, among other aspects, in the deeply unequal socio-spatial distribution of the Brazilian population, in which the Black population—especially the impoverished Black population—is disproportionately concentrated in territories marked by urban precariousness and socioeconomic vulnerability. In this context, violence, often mediated by state institutions and naturalised institutional practices, appears as one of the mechanisms for regulating and maintaining the unequal social order. The notion of an "unequal society" dialogues with a broad tradition of critical interpretation of racial relations in Brazil. Authors such as Clóvis Moura and Lélia Gonzalez, among others, have emphasized that racial inequalities cannot be understood merely as side effects of economic inequalities, but as a constitutive part of the processes of forming the Brazilian State, society, and its human institutions. Based on these theoretical and empirical observations, this panel proposes to discuss how the category of race articulates with contemporary analyses of public policymaking, policy processes, and human society-making, particularly within the scope of so-called interpretative approaches. In the field of public policy, interpretative perspectives have emphasized that policies are not just technical instruments of state intervention, but also sociopolitical and cultural arenas for the transmission, production, and contestation of meanings, values, and interpretations regarding public problems and their possible solutions. In the Brazilian case, this perspective becomes particularly relevant, as the historical formation of the State and public policies has been deeply marked by racial hierarchies. The absence or marginalization of the racial dimension in many public policy analyses contributed, for a long time, to the production of incomplete diagnoses of social inequality, as well as the reproduction of forms of "blindness" toward racism—which, although not always explicit, acts in structural, institutional, and symbolic ways. Considering that the Black population currently accounts for more than half of the Brazilian population and remains, both locally and globally, mostly concentrated in the most vulnerable strata of the social structure, it is evident that the racial issue cannot be treated as a peripheral or sectoral theme. On the contrary, it must be understood as a transversal analytical axis, present in all phases of the public policy cycle—from agenda-setting to formulation, implementation, and evaluation, but not limited to these. It must and can consider other arrangements that mobilize collective community actions and practices in multiple territories, not only in Brazil. In this context, interpretative approaches offer important analytical tools for critical studies to investigate how meanings, institutional narratives, social conditions, and representations of situations, as well as cognitive frames, influence the way public problems are defined and how policies are experienced, and/or designed and implemented. These approaches also allow for the examination of how bureaucrats, managers, and policymakers mobilize specific interpretations of inequality, citizenship, and social justice—interpretations that can either reproduce or challenge historically constituted racial hierarchies by disregarding practices embedded in the multidimensionality of complex public problems. Simultaneously, it is fundamental to recognize that the Brazilian public sphere has been deeply marked by the actions of social movements that challenge these dominant interpretations and drive the struggle for social justice with racial justice. The Brazilian Black movement, in particular, has played a central role in formulating critical diagnoses of structural racism and building political agendas aimed at promoting racial equality. Alongside it, Black women’s movements, Quilombola movements, and Indigenous movements have produced important epistemological and political contributions that challenge traditional and "whitened" (embranquecidos) paradigms of knowledge production and policy formulation. Therefore, this panel seeks to promote a dialogue between critical and interpretative theories of public policy and the epistemologies produced from the historical experiences of resistance and mobilization of racialized populations in Brazil and beyond, further aiming to draw lessons for other spaces in the Global South. References: BISPO DOS SANTOS, A. As fronteiras entre o saber orgânico e o saber sintético. In: OLIVA, A. R. et al. (eds.). Tecendo redes antirracistas. 2019. DAVIS, Angela. Women, race & class. First Vintage Books Edition, February 1983. GONZALEZ, Lélia. Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. HILL COLLINS, Patricia. Intersectionality. Polity Press, 2016. MOURA, Clóvis. Sociologia do negro brasileiro. São Paulo: Ática. TELLES, Edward. Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton University Press, 2003. THEODORO, Mario. A sociedade desigual: racismo e branquitude na formação do Brasil. Brasília: Zahar, 2022.

The interfaces between gender studies and public policy studies have been shaped throughout the development of both fields, albeit not without tensions (Marcondes & Farah, 2021). Over time, the possible articulations between these two fields have expanded in scope and complexity, incorporating new dimensions of the policy process, multiple actors, and diverse epistemological, theoretical, and methodological approaches. In this context, the emergence of Critical-Interpretive Policy Studies, including its regional specificities and contributions—such as the Latin American approach (Boullosa, 2025)—has opened promising avenues for dialogue with Gender Studies. This includes not only feminist scholarship but also other perspectives, such as queer theory and discussions related to the LGBTIA+ community. Both fields share core concerns with power relations; processes of meaning-making; the role of ideas and ideologies; and the importance of language, discourse, and narratives in shaping public problems and institutional responses (Fischer, 2003; Rein & Schön, 1993; Hawkesworth, 2012; Paterson & Scala, 2015). Despite these convergences, the articulation between gender studies and public policy studies remains uneven and still under construction, including within Critical Policy Studies. Advancing this interface requires the development of mediations between these fields, with ontological, epistemological, theoretical, methodological, political, and empirical implications. These mediations may take different forms, with two particularly promising trends: (1) the consolidation of an interdisciplinary field focused on gender public policies; and (2) the incorporation of gender perspectives into critical policy analysis. The first trend refers to scholarly work that contributes to the development of an interdisciplinary field focused on gender public policies, in which concepts and approaches from feminist and gender studies and public policy are mobilized in an integrated manner. This includes research on affirmative action (Farah et al., 2018) and, especially, the strategy-concept of “gender mainstreaming,” understood as the systematic incorporation of gender perspectives across different dimensions of public action (Walby, 2005; Bacchi, 2005; Verloo & Lombardo, 2007; Guzmán & Montaño, 2012; Forest & Lombardo, 2012; Marcondes & Farah, 2021). The second trend enables the incorporation of gender perspectives into Critical-Interpretive Policy Studies, expanding the analytical capacity of this field by highlighting dimensions often rendered invisible in the processes of policy formulation and implementation. Gender studies provide robust conceptual tools for analyzing the power relations that permeate public action. The notion of gender as an analytical category (Lugones, 2010; Collins, 2022) allows for an understanding of how socially constructed differences are mobilized to organize social and institutional relations. At the same time, contemporary feminist approaches emphasize the centrality of institutions, political practices, and governance processes in reproducing or transforming inequalities (Hawkesworth, 2012). Reflections on intersectionality (Gonzalez, 1984; Crenshaw, 2002; Collins & Bilge, 2021), as well as the notion of imbrication (Falquet, 2022), associated with gender, represent another key trend in building such mediations. These approaches enable the analysis of how gender intersects with race, ethnicity, class, generation, disability, and territory in public policy processes. Research on domestic work (both paid and unpaid) and care is an important example of this second trend (Teixeira, 2021; Guimarães, 2024). The potential of the interface between critical and gender studies is not limited to the theoretical level but also encompasses a wide range of methodological approaches, often within the interpretive tradition. Research at this intersection may employ qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods, reflecting the complexity of the phenomena under analysis. Discourse, document, and narrative analysis, for instance, can be combined with case studies, comparative analyses, and statistical methods, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of policy dynamics. From an empirical perspective, a broad range of policy areas can be explored, including labor, health, education, social protection, violence, sexual and reproductive rights, and care, among others. These areas constitute privileged sites for analyzing gender relations, both in terms of the reproduction of inequalities and the possibilities for transformation through public action. References: Bacchi, C. (2005). Discourse, discourse everywhere: Subject “agency” in feminist discourse methodology. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 13(3), 198–209. Boullosa, R. de F. (2025). Critical policy studies in Latin America. In L. Secchi & C. N. Cruz-Rubio (Eds.), Handbook of public policy in Latin America (pp. 105–120). Edward Elgar Publishing. Collins, P. H. (2022). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge. Crenshaw, K. (2002). Documento para o encontro de especialistas em aspectos da discriminação racial relativos ao gênero. Revista Estudos Feministas, 10(1), 171–188. Falquet, J. (2022). Imbricación: Más allá de la interseccionalidad. Mujeres, raza y clase en los movimientos sociales. Madreselva. Farah, M. F. S., Diniz, A. P. R., Marcondes, M. M., Youssef, L. M., & Silva, M. C. F. (2018). Gênero e política pública: Panorama da produção acadêmica no Brasil (1983–2015). Cadernos EBAPE.BR, 16(3), 1–18. Fischer, F. (2003). Reframing public policy: Discursive politics and deliberative practices. Oxford University Press. Forest, M., & Lombardo, E. (2012). The Europeanization of gender equality policies: A discursive-sociological approach. In M. Forest & E. Lombardo (Eds.), The Europeanization of gender equality policies. Palgrave Macmillan. Gonzalez, L. (1984). Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira. Revista Ciências Sociais Hoje, 223–244. Guimarães, N. A. (2024). A “crise do cuidado” e os cuidados na crise: Refletindo a partir da experiência brasileira. Sociologia & Antropologia, 14, e230050. Guzmán, V., & Montaño, S. (2012). Políticas públicas e igualdade de gênero. CEPAL. Hawkesworth, M. (2012). Political worlds of women: Activism, advocacy, and governance in the twenty-first century. 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