LIST OF WORKSHOPS

we have a  fourth Chair - Karel Cada - University of Economics Prague

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Emphasis on emotion as an integral part of interaction and cognitive perception of the world around us has recently become an important perspective in public policy. While the mainstream approaches to public policy see in emotions elements shaping collective action and impacting policy processes, this workshop wants to look at emotions as meaningful practices, shaping our understanding of policies and related processes in the first place. Emotions shape and reshape values and beliefs through the meanings they give them, for example, through the specific expression of fear, joy, anger, pride, disgust or rage. Through this meaning-making capacity, emotions influence who has a voice in political debates and how powerful that voice is.

In current public debates around policy measures, policy instruments or policy controversies, it appears that some emotions are presented and accepted as legitimate for some people or events, but then, when they appear in other contexts, they are instead seen as disqualifying. Especially in political negotiations, emotions are then displaced as something that, while to certain extent an understandable situation, is irrelevant or unacceptable to a particular policy solution and policy instrument because it is too chaotic, naive, subjective and not grounded in a systematic inquiry. This dynamic of the legitimacy of emotions, while it may seem legitimate in times of pandemic management, points to the need to pay attention to the specific context in which emotions are used or presented.
 

While emotions have recently spurred considerable interest in policy scholarship, the workshop wants to discuss their critical capacity to unravel and shape societal and political crises. In the scholarship on emotions in politics, it is widely accepted that emotions are involved in knowledge-making processes and cannot really be separated from decisions (Maia and Hauber 2020), which has impacted most of the policy research on deliberation (Johnson et al 2017, Thompson and Hoggett 2001, van Stokkom 2005). Emotions are also seen as having an important role in value production and value sharing (Jasper 2011), impacting group behavior and thus also the creation of groups (Sasley 2011). All these approaches support the inclusion of emotions into studies of public policy, on the basis of the general cognitive capacity of emotions to shape our judgments, values, and actions (Barbalet 2002, Berezin 2009, Jasper 2011). Interpretive approach to emotions in policy scholarship has led to explanation of how citizens shape the policy process through their anger and anxiety (Verhoeven and Duyvendak 2016) or how emotions circulating in the policy fields affect how we talk about these fields (Paterson 2019). Other works highlight the link between interpretation and the importance of performance of emotions, including the bodily aspect of emotionality (Anderson 2017).
 
While not refuting this cognitive capacity of emotions, the workshop wants to put forward the analysis and discussion of  social, cultural, and political patterns through which emotions are made meaningful (Durnova 2019, Durnová 2018). This is not to say that interpretivism considers emotions solely through their social cultural or political context. The relation between emotion and discourses is interdependent, and this relationship is at the core of the interest of the workshop. In this regard, emotions are understood here as a form of knowledge (Holland 2007), a way to narrate a  problem (Czarniawska 2015), or  a way  to frame the emotional context of a policy issue (Paterson and Larios 2020).
 

In a nutshell, emotions are important for policies, as content of issues to be regulated, while they are also relevant for the way these contents are communicated. The specific boundaries of emotionality can challenge the policy situation because they point to what is acceptable and seen as legitimate in a given situation: positive and negative emotions are discursive labels, and the way these labels are embedded in the larger context impacts who has a say in politics, what kind of knowledge is accepted, and where this knowledge needs to be situated with policy actors.

Against this background, we invite papers that deal with themes of emotions, public policy, and crises. The purpose of the Workshop is to challenge and learn from each other and explore new ways of these themes. Participants should expect engaging and constructive dialogue; we hope to receive scholars from a variety of backgrounds. We, therefore, welcome individuals both new and experienced in the study of emotions, including graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and new and experienced instructors and professors. Papers dealing with issues of contemporary relevance, such as the pandemic and climate change, are encouraged but not required. Papers may come from any part of the world in the form of case studies or comparative analyses and utilize a variety of methodological and theoretical orientations. What is required is an open mind and a willingness to engage each other and these themes.

Emphasis on emotion as an integral part of interaction and cognitive perception of the world around us has recently become an important perspective in public policy. While the mainstream approaches to public policy see in emotions elements shaping collective action and impacting policy processes, this workshop wants to look at emotions as meaningful practices, shaping our understanding of policies and related processes in the first place. Emotions shape and reshape values and beliefs through the meanings they give them, for example, through the specific expression of fear, joy, anger, pride, disgust or rage. Through this meaning-making capacity, emotions influence who has a voice in political debates and how powerful that voice is.

In current public debates around policy measures, policy instruments or policy controversies, it appears that some emotions are presented and accepted as legitimate for some people or events, but then, when they appear in other contexts, they are instead seen as disqualifying. Especially in political negotiations, emotions are then displaced as something that, while to certain extent an understandable situation, is irrelevant or unacceptable to a particular policy solution and policy instrument because it is too chaotic, naive, subjective and not grounded in a systematic inquiry. This dynamic of the legitimacy of emotions, while it may seem legitimate in times of pandemic management, points to the need to pay attention to the specific context in which emotions are used or presented.
 

In a nutshell, emotions are important for policies, as content of issues to be regulated, while they are also relevant for the way these contents are communicated. The specific boundaries of emotionality can challenge the policy situation because they point to what is acceptable and seen as legitimate in a given situation: positive and negative emotions are discursive labels, and the way these labels are embedded in the larger context impacts who has a say in politics, what kind of knowledge is accepted, and where this knowledge needs to be situated with policy actors.

We invite papers that deal with themes of emotions, public policy, and crises. The purpose of the Workshop is to challenge and learn from each other and explore new ways of these themes. Participants should expect engaging and constructive dialogue; we hope to receive scholars from a variety of backgrounds. We, therefore, welcome individuals both new and experienced in the study of emotions, including graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and new and experienced instructors and professors. Papers dealing with issues of contemporary relevance, such as the pandemic and climate change, are encouraged but not required. Papers may come from any part of the world in the form of case studies or comparative analyses and utilize a variety of methodological and theoretical orientations. What is required is an open mind and a willingness to engage each other and these themes.

Crises are often a source of conflict over whether and how society should change. For some, crises prompt resistance and a call to "hunker down" and reinforce current practices in the name of resilience. For others, crises reveal flaws in societal structures and processes, prompting transformations of who gets what, when, and where. For both sides, crises entail sensemaking through political discourse and argumentation to legitimize one position over others. This Workshop entitled "Emotional Policies and Politics of Emotions in Times of Crisis" seeks papers focusing on emotions in the discourse on crises. These papers can examine how emotions interweave in the construction and empowerment of knowledge, delegitimize and legitimize arguments, mobilize and shape political behavior, and more. We welcome a broad interpretation of crises, including the acute and local (e.g., a flood or forest fire), the chronic and global (e.g., climate change, the current pandemic), and everything in between. This Workshop operates from a perspective of scientific pluralism; we encourage papers from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives, including interpretive and positivist approaches.  Graduate students are encourage to apply. 

Anna Durnová  is a professor of Political Sociology at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna. She researchers the interplays of emotions and knowledge in public policy. The main interest of this work is to understand the conditions of political legitimacy and the way citizen engage with expertise in democratic societies. She  is Faculty Fellow of Yale University Center for Cultural Sociology and Forum Editor of Critical Policy Studies (CPS).  She has published several articles and two books on the role of emotions in politics (The Politics of Intimacy, University of Michigan Press, 2018 / Understanding Emotions in Post-Factual Politics, Edward Elgar 2019). In 2019, she was awarded the City of Vienna Award for Research.

Chris Weible is a professor at University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs. His research and teaching center on political conflict and concord in relation to public policy issues. He co-directs the Workshop on Policy Process Research (WOPPR) and is currently serving as the Director for the PhD Program. He teaches courses in environmental politics, policy processes, policy analysis, and research methods and design. Recent and current research include studying multi-stakeholder collaboration processes in aquaculture partnerships, assessing policy designs and improving outcomes in organic farming, and analyzing the politics of unconventional oil and gas development using hydraulic fracturing (fracking). He co-edited “Theories of the Policy Process” and “Policy Debates in Hydraulic Fracturing.” Prof. Weible earned his PhD in Ecology from the University of California Davis, and a Master of Public Administration and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Washington.

Eva M. Hejzlarová is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Public and Social Policy, Faculty of Social Sciences, Prague, Czechia. Her main research interests are focused around the interplays of policy design and its receivers with special respect to their emotional settings and its dynamics. Her current research include studying „home“ as a component of public policy instrument under pandemic conditions and beyond. She has been a member of Editorial Advisory Board of Policy & Politics and a „Solidarity Fellow“ in the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity (CeSCoS), University of Vienna, Austria.

Karel Čada is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Managerial Psychology and Sociology, Prague University of Economics and Business. His main research interests are focused around narratives, discourse and using of qualitative research in public policy and organization studies. His current research include studying local consequences od climate change. He was a visiting scholar at the Australian National University Centre for European Studies.