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:

1. Analyze how everyday interactions between citizens and public institutions may reproduce inequalities, exclusion, discrimination, and institutional violence.

2. Explore the role of emotions in shaping state–society interactions, how they are interpreted and narrated, reinforcing or challenging cultures of inequality.

3. Examine experiences of inclusive public institutions capable of producing belonging, recognition, and positive affective ties with vulnerable groups.

4. 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.

Requirements for Applicants

The workshop welcomes researchers, graduate students, public managers, practitioners, and activists interested in interpretive policy analysis, public service interactions, emotions in policy processes, social inequalities, inclusive institutions, and critical approaches to public administration.

This workshop is intended for a cohort of 15 to 25 participants. The selection process will be based on a 500-word abstract proposal in which applicants outline their research and/or professional experience related to the workshop theme and reflect on how they envision contributing to the workshop’s collective development. Following the selection process, participants will be expected to submit a more developed paper (1500-2000 words) that engages more deeply with one of the issues or themes introduced in the abstract proposal.

Language:

The workshop will be conducted in English, with AI-assisted translation support in Portuguese and Spanish.

References:

AUYERO, Javier: Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

BOOSSABONG, P., & CHAMCHONG, P. (2024). Hope, fear and public policy: Towards empathetic policy process. Critical Policy Studies, 18(3), 389–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2024.2321086

BOULLOSA, Rosana F. Mirando ao revés as políticas públicas: os desenvolvimentos de uma abordagem crítica e reflexiva para o estudo das políticas públicas. Publicações da Escola da AGU, v. 11, p. 89–106, 2019.

CRENSHAW, Kimberlé. Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, v. 43, n. 6, p. 1241–1299, 1991.

DUBOIS, V. (1999). La vie au guichet: Relation administrative et traitement de la misère. Économica, coll. « études politiques ».