Suchergebnisse

Ausschreibung der Universität Lüneburg. Deadline: 3. April 2024

Informiert man sich über konkrete politische Maßnahmen gegen die Klimakatastrophe, dann fällt auf, dass viele dieser Maßnahmen bisher nur das Stadium von Modellstudien, Pilotprojekten oder Testphasen erreicht haben. Das zeigt zwar, dass es eine große Vielzahl an Ideen und nachhaltigen Konzepten gibt, die aber, weil sie bisher noch nicht großflächig gebaut wurden, ihren Beitrag gegen die Klimakatastrophe noch nicht ausschöpfen.Einer der Aspekte, warum viele Projekte bisher noch nicht über die Pilotphase hinausgekommen sind, ist die Schwierigkeit der Umsetzung der Maßnahmen, gerade in den dicht bebauten Städten. Daher möchte ich ein Pilotprojekt vorstellen, das besonders für die Stadtentwicklung sehr interessant sein könnte, den Solardach-Radweg in Freiburg.Im April 2023 ist in Freiburg nach sechsmonatiger Bauzeit der erste Radweg mit einem Dach aus PV-Modulen eröffnet worden. Die nun 300 überdachten Meter Radweg sollen etwa 280.000 kWh Strom pro Jahr produzieren und liegen gegenüber dem neu erbauten Stadion des SC Freiburg. Auch hier kennt man sich mit PV-Modulen aus. So wurde auf dem Dach des Europa-Park Stadions 2022 die weltweit zweitgrößte PV-Anlage auf einem Fußballstadion errichtet und soll den erwarteten Strombedarf des Komplexes abdecken.In seiner jetzigen Pilotphase kann der Solardach-Radweg bisher den jährlichen Stromverbrauch von etwa 180 Personen stillen. Dem gegenüber stehen Projektkosten von etwa einer Million Euro. Errichtet wurde die Anlage vom Energieversorgungsunternehmen badenova, der Stadt Freiburg und dem Fraunhofer-Institut für Solare Energiesysteme (ISE). Letzteres stellt auch die wissenschaftliche Begleitung des Projekts und erhofft sich mit den gemachten Erfahrungen weitere städtebauliche Konzepte in Verbindung mit PV-Anlagen zu erarbeiten. Die Vorteile des Solardach-Radwegs sind:die Stromerzeugung im öffentlichen und bisher ungenutzten Raumdie Aufwertung von Radwegender Schutz der Radfahrer vor Wettereinflüssen und durch die Konstruktion des Solardachs auch vor anderen Verkehrsteilnehmerndie über Bewegungsmelder gesteuerte gezielte Beleuchtung einzelner Streckenabschnittedie Lichtdurchlässigkeit der PV-Module, die tagsüber eine natürliche Sonneneinstrahlung ermöglichenDas Projekt ist darauf ausgelegt, dass zukünftig die Tragkonstruktion der PV-Module nicht als Einzelanfertigung konzipiert, sondern als erweiterbares System kostengünstig in Masse hergestellt werden kann. Auch im Hinblick auf die technische Weiterentwicklung des Systems ist durch das Pilotprojekt der erste Schritt getan. Laut den Projektpartnern gibt es Anfragen aus ganz Europa und es bleibt zu hoffen, dass das Konzept Solardach-Radweg über die Testphase hinauskommt und flächendeckend umgesetzt wird. Quellenhttps://www.adfc.de/neuigkeit/erster-radweg-mit-solardach-in-freiburg (zuletzt abgerufen 09.07.2023)https://www.badenovawaermeplus.de/erneuerbare-energien/sonne/anlagen/solarradwegueberdachung/ (zuletzt abgerufen 09.07.2023)https://www.freiburg.de/pb/1984611.html (zuletzt abgerufen 09.07.2023)https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/suedbaden/solarradweg-in-freiburg-eingeweiht-100.html (zuletzt abgerufen 09.07.2023)

Some pictures for Econ 442, monetary policy module. Source: Eurofi. Source: Eurofi. Summary: Source: Dallas Fed DGEI. CFR Monetary Policy Tracker shows whether policy is tightening or loosening in February. Source: CFR. On a related note, here's 2s10s term spreads around the world. Source: Worldgovernmentbonds.com.

Die dargestellte Lehrveranstaltung ist eine kurzfristig durchgeführte Umgestaltung des 4 SWS-Seminar im Wahlpflicht-Modul Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (FKF) im Sommersemester 2022 an der TU Braunschweig, dessen Kontext der Krieg in der Ukraine und die Umstellung von Online zu Präsenzlehre war (Lehrende: Prof. Dr. Anja P. Jakobi). Durch administrative Flexibilität der Lehrplanung konnte hier schnell ein Angebot geschaffen werden, dass neben den vermittelten Inhalten auch eine Vielzahl mündlicher und schriftlicher Kompetenzen der Studierenden individuell fördern konnte. Danke auch an die engagierten Studierenden im Kurs!

Vortrag von Sina Marie Nietz bei Festo am 24.10.2019 (verschriftlichte Form)Der Titel dieses Vortrags beinhaltet mehrere "Riesenbegriffe": Globalisierung und Digitalisierung, zwei Begriffe, die heutzutage geradezu inflationär genutzt werden und dabei ganz unterschiedliche Prozesse und Entwicklungen beschreiben. Autonomer Individualverkehr, Pflege-Roboter, softwaregesteuerte Kundenkorrespondenz und Social Media, Big-Data-Ökonomie, Clever-Bots, Industrie 4.0. Die Digitalisierung hat ökonomische, kulturelle und politische Auswirkungen auf allen gesellschaftlichen Ebenen. Die zunehmenden technischen Möglichkeiten vor allem durch KI zwingen uns auch zu einer Auseinandersetzung mit ethischen Fragen und unseren bisherigen Konzepten von Intelligenz. Was zeichnet menschliches Handeln aus? Wie unterscheidet sich menschliche, natürliche Intelligenz von Künstlicher? Die Frage, was menschliches Handeln und menschliche Intelligenz von Maschinen unterscheidet, wird aus einem Alltagsverständnis heraus häufig mit Emotionen wie Empathie, Mitgefühl, Einfühlungsvermögen, Mitmenschlichkeit beantwortet. All diese Begriffe wollen wir nun zunächst einmal unter "emotionaler Intelligenz" zusammenfassen, bevor wir uns zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt näher damit auseinandersetzen werden.Globalisierung – ein weiterer überaus komplexer Begriff, der genutzt wird, um ganz unterschiedliche Prozesse zu beschreiben. Globalisierung meint die Verflechtung von Handelsbeziehungen und Kommunikationstechnologien sowie den Anstieg von Mobilität. Globalisierung umfasst zunehmende transnationale Abhängigkeiten in Form von losen Abkommen, Verträgen und Gesetzen. Globalisierung bedeutet auch, dass Organisationen wie NGOs, transnationale Institutionen, Konzerne und Staaten über Ländergrenzen hinweg agieren und kooperieren. Globalisierung meint jedoch auch globale Herausforderungen wie internationalen Terrorismus und vor allem die Klimakatastrophe. In dieser Zeit zunehmender Verflechtungen und internationaler Abhängigkeiten lassen sich gleichzeitig nationalistische Tendenzen beobachten, die der zunehmenden Öffnung gesellschaftliche Abschottung entgegenzusetzen versuchen. Die Frage nach Öffnung oder Abschottung polarisiert und spaltet. In der Wissenschaft wird von einer neuen gesellschaftlichen Konfliktlinie, einer cleavage gesprochen. Die cleavage zwischen Öffnung und Abschottung, zwischen Kosmopoliten und Nationalisten, zwischen Rollkoffer und Rasenmäher.Die Ergebnisse der letzten Europawahlen im Mai 2019 haben jene cleavage eindeutig widergespiegelt. Die etablierten Parteien, allen voran CDU/CSU und SPD, haben erneut massiv Wählerstimmen eingebüßt. Wohingegen auf der einen Seite der neuen gesellschaftlichen Konfliktlinie die AfD mit ihrem Abschottungskurs und auf der anderen Seite die Grünen, die klare Kante für Kosmopolitismus verkörpern, Stimmenzuwächse verzeichnen konnten. Auch in anderen europäischen Ländern sahen die Wahlergebnisse programmatisch vergleichbarer Parteien ähnlich aus.Bereits seit der Wirtschafts- bzw. "Eurokrise" erhalten rechtspopulistische Parteien zunehmend Zuspruch in ganz Europa. Deutschland war mit der AfD in dieser Hinsicht ein Nachzügler. Der Begriff "Rechtspopulismus" ist dabei nicht ganz unproblematisch. Zum einen dient er als sogenannter "battle term", um gegnerische Parteien oder PolitikerInnen zu degradieren. Zum anderen findet er keine einheitliche Verwendung, sondern wird genutzt, um einen Politikstil, eine rhetorische Strategie, eine Mobilisierungsstrategie oder eine politische Ideologie zu bezeichnen. Des Weiteren bildet sich zunehmend der Konsens heraus, dass mit dem Begriff auch die Gefahr der Verharmlosung in Bezug auf Parteien oder Personen einhergeht, die ihrer politischen Gesinnung nach eigentlich als rechtsradikal bis rechtsextrem einzuordnen sind. Trotz dieser Schwierigkeiten hat sich in den vergangenen Jahren durch zahlreiche Publikationen ein wissenschaftlicher Konsens geformt. Im Folgenden soll die Definition von Rechtspopulismus nach Jan Werner Müller, einem der federführenden Populismusforscher in Deutschland, umrissen werden. Populismus leitet sich von dem lateinischen Wort "populus", zu deutsch "Volk", ab. Der Bezug auf das Volk ist für jede Form des Populismus essenziell. In der Logik des Populismus stehen "dem Volk" die "korrupten Eliten", das Establishment gegenüber ("Altparteien", "Eurokraten"…). Es ist prinzipiell variabel, wer zu den Eliten zählt. In diesem Zusammenhang wird häufig das vermeintliche Paradoxon Donald Trump angeführt. Dieser zählt aufgrund seines Vermögens definitiv zu einer finanziellen Elite, kann sich jedoch aufgrund seines Mangels an Politikerfahrung als Politikaußenseiter, als "Mann aus dem Volk" und Sprachrohr des Volkes darstellen.Jan Werner-Müller zufolge sind RechtspopulistInnen immer anti-elitär, doch nicht jeder, der Eliten kritisiert, ist auch automatisch ein Rechtspopulist. Es muss immer noch ein zweites Kriterium gegeben sein, nämlich das des Anti-Pluralismus. In einer pluralistischen Gesellschaft konkurrieren zahlreiche verschiedene Organisationen, gesellschaftliche Gruppierungen und Parteien um wirtschaftliche und politische Macht. Es herrscht außerdem Vielfalt in Form von Meinungen und unterschiedlichen Lebensentwürfen. Rechtspopulismus lehnt diese Vielfalt ab. Es findet demnach nicht nur eine Abgrenzung nach oben zu "den Eliten", sondern auch nach unten ("Sozialschmarotzer") bzw. außen ("der Fremde", "der Islam", "die Flüchtlinge", Homosexuelle) statt. Rechtspopulistische Repräsentanten behaupten, ein homogen gedachtes "wahres Volk" mit einem einheitlichen Volkswillen zu vertreten. So wird ein moralischer Alleinvertretungsanspruch postuliert. Da der homogen konstruierte Volkswille in der Logik des Rechtspopulismus a priori feststeht und RechtspopulistInnen diesen repräsentieren, bedarf es keiner anderen Parteien oder Vertreter. Daraus ergibt sich jedoch ein Logikproblem, wenn sie dann bei Wahlen nicht die Mehrheit der Stimmen auf sich vereinen können. So betrug der Stimmenanteil der AfD bei der Bundestagswahl 2017 12,6%. Um diese Differenz "erklären" zu können, werden verschwörungstheoretische Erklärungsmuster wie das einer "schweigenden Mehrheit" herangezogen. Es werden gezielt Zweifel am politischen System, an den Medien ("Lügenpresse") und der Wissenschaft gesät. Es wird auf vermeintliche Fehler im System und die angebliche Unterdrückung des "eigentlichen Volkswillens" verwiesen. So schaffen RechtspopulistInnen eine Parallelwelt der "alternativen Fakten" und tragen zur Spaltung der Gesellschaft bei.Betrachtet man die verschiedenen rechtspopulistischen Parteien und Bewegungen in Europa, stößt man auf Unterschiede in deren Inhalten und Strategien. So hat Geert Wilders in den Niederlanden beispielsweise immer eine sehr liberale Gesellschaftspolitik vertreten, etwa in Form liberaler Abtreibungsgesetze und der Befürwortung gleichgeschlechtlicher Ehen. In Polen fährt die PiS-Partei hingegen einen katholisch geprägten konservativen Kurs hinsichtlich gesellschaftspolitischer Themen, wie auch die FPÖ in Österreich. Als gemeinsame Klammer dient allen rechtspopulistischen Parteien ihre ablehnende bis feindliche Haltung gegenüber Migration und "dem Islam". Die ausgrenzende Gesinnung bildet demnach das Kernelement rechtspopulistischer Ideologien. Das bedeutet, dass es keinen Rechtspopulismus ohne Feindbilder gibt.Und damit wären wir bei der ersten These meines heutigen Vortrags: Feindbilder sind das Kernelement von Rechtspopulismus. Rechtspopulistische Parteien greifen gezielt xenophobe Vorurteile, Stereotype und Emotionen wie Angst und Hass auf, schüren diese und verbreiten sie so. Wir werden gleich noch darauf zu sprechen kommen, wie sie dies genau machen. Vorurteile sind eine effektive Strategie, um Ungleichheit oder die Entstehung von Ungleichheit zu legitimieren. Hier dockt der Populismus perfekt an die bereits vorhandene Ungleichheitsideologie unserer meritokratischen Leistungsgesellschaft an. Unsere freie Marktwirtschaft basiert auf der Annahme der Notwendigkeit von Ungleichheit und legitimiert diese durch unterschiedliche Mechanismen. Stichworte in diesem Kontext lauten: survival of the fittest, Leistungsprinzip, Konkurrenzdruck in Zeiten von Outsourcing von Arbeitsplätzen und Zeitarbeit, Selbstoptimierung, Humankapital.Ich würde Sie an dieser Stelle gerne zu einem kurzen Exkurs in die Kognitionswissenschaft einladen, um die Bedeutung von Vorurteilen und Stereotypen für das menschliche Denken und Handeln näher zu erläutern. Der menschliche Verstand benötigt Kategorien zum Denken, zum Einordnen und Verarbeiten von Sinneseindrücken und Informationen. Andernfalls würde der Prozess der Informationsverarbeitung viel zu viel Zeit beanspruchen und wir wären nicht handlungsfähig. Wir ordnen unsere Eindrücke also bestimmten, vorgefertigten Kategorien zu. Innerhalb einer Kategorie erhält nun alles dieselbe Vorstellungs- bzw. Gefühlstönung. Der Grad der Verallgemeinerung hängt mit dem Wissen über die einzuordnende Information zusammen. Auf die rechtspopulistischen Ausgrenzungsstrategien bezogen ergibt sich Folgendes: Es wird das Feindbild "Islam" konstruiert und mit Eigenschaften wie "Gewalt" und "Terror" verknüpft. Dabei wird nicht zwischen verschiedenen Strömungen und Glaubensrichtungen unterschieden, sondern alles zu einem homogenen Gebräu innerhalb derselben Kategorie umgerührt. Individuen, die aufgrund von Herkunft, Religionszugehörigkeit, Ethnie etc. dieser Gruppe zugezählt werden, werden als Teil der Feindgruppe gedacht, nicht als Individuen. Sie werden objektiviert und entmenschlicht. Das Leiden des Einzelnen geht in der Masse unter und Empathie wird verhindert. Einzelne Ausnahmen werden als solche anerkannt, um das Gesamtbild, bzw. die gebildeten Kategorien, aufrechterhalten zu können. Und damit sind wir bei der zweiten These angelangt: Die Verallgemeinerung rechtspopulistischer Ausgrenzungsstrategien verhindert Empathie.Die einfache Zweiteilung des Freund-Feind-Denkens geht mit einer enormen Reduktion von Komplexität einher - ein attraktives Angebot in Zeiten zunehmender Komplexität und Undurchschaubarkeit (Stichwort Globalisierung). Doch wie werden diese Feindbilder nun genau erzeugt und aufrechterhalten? Hierzu bedienen sich rechtspopulistische Akteure unterschiedlicher rhetorischen Strategien.Rechtspopulistische Sprache ist zumeist eine reduktionistische und sehr bildhafte Sprache. Es werden häufig Metaphern verwendet, die Träger einer Botschaft sind. So ist der im Kontext der Migrationsbewegungen ab 2015 oft verwendete Begriff "Flüchtlingswelle" kein neutraler Begriff. Die Zusammensetzung der beiden Worte "Flüchtlinge" und "Welle" impliziert eine unaufhaltsame Naturgewalt, gegenüber der es sich durch Bauen eines Dammes abzuschotten gilt. Zudem finden auch biologistische Metaphern wie "Flüchtlingsschwärme" ihren Einzug in rechtspopulistische Narrative. Die Entlehnung nationalsozialistisch geprägter Begriffe wie beispielsweise "völkisch" durch Akteure der AfD hat nicht nur einmal zu medialer Aufmerksamkeit geführt. Weitere häufig verwendete rhetorische Strategien und Stilmittel sind Wiederholungen, Wortneuschöpfungen, Tabubrüche, kalkulierte Ambivalenz und auch die eingangs erwähnten Verschwörungstheorien. Ich möchte diese Stilmittel nicht im Einzelnen näher ausführen. Aber ich möchte auf die Beziehung zwischen Rechtspopulismus und Medien aufmerksam machen. Es gab in den vergangenen Monaten zahlreiche Beispiele für Tabubrüche seitens der AfD, die nach und nach zu einer Diskursverschiebung geführt hat, die mit einer Normalisierung von Gewalt in der Sprache im öffentlichen Diskurs einhergeht.Medien und Populismus folgen ähnlichen Kommunikationsstrategien wie beispielsweise Personalisierung, Emotionalisierung, Dramatisierung und Komplexitätsreduktion. Trotz der grundlegend feindlichen Einstellung rechtspopulistischer Parteien gegenüber der "Lügenpresse" gehen Populismus und Massenmedien eine Art Symbiose ein. Die Massenmedien sind auf Schlagzeilen angewiesen und die PopulistInnen auf mediale Aufmerksamkeit. Eine besondere Rolle spielen insbesondere seit dem letzten US-Wahlkampf soziale Medien wie Twitter. Trump bezeichnete sich einmal selbst als den "Hemingway der 140 Zeichen". Durch seine kurzen Tweets in einer einfach gehaltenen Sprache vermittelt er Nahbarkeit und inszeniert sich als Sprachrohr des Volkes. Immer in Abgrenzung zu der abgehobenen, korrupten Politikelite mit ihrer "political correctness". Es scheint, als würden "gefühlte Wahrheiten" schwerer wiegen als Fakten, so wird häufig vom Anbruch des postfaktischen Zeitalters gesprochen. Das Leugnen wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse bei gleichzeitiger Fokussierung auf "alternative" und "gefühlte Wahrheiten" birgt die Gefahr einer zunehmenden Parallelwelt der Fakten.Durch Echokammern und Filterblasen verfestigen sich eigene Einstellungen und die politische Meinung. Die neue Rechte hat sich zudem die Funktionsweise von Algorithmen und Bots zunutze gemacht und wirkt dadurch in Sozialen Netzwerken wie Facebook und Twitter, aber auch in Foren und Blogs unheimlich präsent. Medien sind hier keine Einrichtungen im Sinne von Organisationseinheiten mit besonderen Rechten, Sach- und Personalmitteln, sondern Räume und Kanäle. Dialogroboter sind zugleich Werkzeug und Medium einer neuen Kommunikationswelt. In den Massenmedien kann man eine stetige Zunahme von dialogischer Kommunikation beobachten. Dialogroboter werden funktional wie Massenmedien eingesetzt, funktionieren strukturell aber nach den Prinzipien interpersoneller Kommunikation.Kehren wir zu den beiden Ausgangsthesen zurück. Erstens: Feindbilder sind ein Kernelement von Rechtspopulismus. Zweitens: Die Verallgemeinerung von Feindbildern verhindert Empathie. Nun stellt sich die Frage nach möglichen Lösungsansätzen. Wie kann der dargelegten Objektivierung von Menschen durch Feindbilder entgegengewirkt werden? Welche Gegenstrategien gibt es? Häufig werden sehr allgemeine Handlungsempfehlungen ausgesprochen oder die Ausführungen zu möglichen Lösungen sehr kurz gehalten, sodass der politikwissenschaftliche Diskurs bisweilen in Bezug auf die Gegenstrategien ungenau und schwammig bleibt.Ich möchte Ihnen heute einen spezifischen Ansatz vorstellen, der darauf abzielt, Empathie als Teil emotionaler Intelligenz zu stärken, um rechtspopulistischen Feindbildern präventiv zu begegnen. Die gezielte Schulung von Empathie als Teil emotionaler Intelligenz. Das Konzept der emotionalen Intelligenz (EQ) kam in den 1990er Jahren auf, federführend unter den Sozialpsychologen John D. Mayer und Peter Salovey. Das gleichnamige Buch veröffentlichte 1995 Daniel Goleman. Bereits damals wurde Empathie als eine "Schlüsselkompetenz" emotionaler Intelligenz gefasst. Hier wurde zum einen der Versuch unternommen, auf die Bedeutung von Gefühlen beim Erreichen beruflicher Ziele und des eigenen Lebensglücks zu verweisen, zum anderen EQ messbar zu machen, sodass bald darauf zahlreiche EQ-Tests folgten. Der Versuch, Intelligenz anhand von Testsituationen oder ähnlichen Verfahren messbar zu machen, geht jedoch mit einigen Aspekten einher, die es kritisch zu betrachten gilt. Vor allem stellt sich, wie auch bei den klassischen IQ-Tests (auf denen im Übrigen unser heutiges Verständnis von Intelligenz beruht) die Frage, ob tatsächlich das gemessen wird, was gemessen werden soll. In einer Leistungsgesellschaft, die dem Diktat der Transparenz und Messbarkeit (PISA, Evaluationen etc.) unterworfen ist, haben es schlecht messbare emotionale Kompetenzen wie Empathie schwer.Die zunehmenden Abhängigkeiten im Kontext der Globalisierung weisen eigentlich in Richtung Kooperation. Die vorherrschende Ideologie unserer Gesellschaft basiert jedoch nach wie vor auf dem Konkurrenzprinzip. Die meritokratische Leistungs- und Wettbewerbsideologie des freien Marktes hat ein empathiefeindliches Umfeld geschaffen. Zudem lässt die Hyperindividualisierung Empathie unwahrscheinlicher werden. Das Wachstum des "Ichs" als Instanz der Nicht-Ähnlichkeit führt zur Kultivierung eines Bewusstseins für Differenzen anstatt für Gemeinsamkeiten. Je mehr wir uns auf die Unterschiede konzentrieren, desto schwieriger werden empathische Empfindungen und Handlungen, da diese eine Identifikation mit dem Anderen voraussetzen. Des Weiteren hat insbesondere im Bildungsdiskurs viele Jahre lang eine einseitige Fokussierung auf Rationalität stattgefunden. Diese impliziert eine künstliche Trennung zwischen Emotionalität und Rationalität. Zusammenfassend lässt sich festhalten, dass verschiedene gesellschaftliche, politische, aber vor allem auch ökonomische Faktoren wie die neoliberale Konkurrenz- und Wettbewerbsideologie, das Diktat der Messbarkeit, die Hyperindividualisierung sowie die einseitige Fokussierung auf Rationalität der Etablierung von Empathie als Schlüsselkompetenz des 21. Jahrhunderts im Weg standen und noch immer stehen. Doch was bedeutet Empathie eigentlich konkret in einem wissenschaftlichen Verständnis? Empathie stammt von dem griechischen Wort "Pathos", zu deutsch "Leidenschaft". Umgangssprachlich ist mit Empathie die Fähigkeit des Sich-in-jemand-Einfühlens oder Hineinversetzens gemeint. Empathie hat eine kognitive (Wahrnehmung der Interessen des Anderen) und eine affektive (dabei entstehende Gefühle) Komponente. Die Entstehung von Empathie erfolgt in drei Schritten: Soziale Perspektivenübernahme, Identifikation, Empathie. Die Übernahme einer anderen Perspektive erlernen wir bereits im Kleinkindalter. Zunächst anhand der Übernahme räumlicher Perspektiven. Durch den zweiten Schritt, die Identifikation mit einer anderen Person oder einem anderen Lebewesen, entsteht das Potenzial für die empathische Einfühlung in jene Person oder jenes Lebewesen. Aus dieser empathischen Empfindung kann wiederum ein gewisses Aktionspotenzial entstehen, wenn beispielsweise eine Ungerechtigkeit Empörung auslöst und zur Aktion gegen jene Ungerechtigkeit führt.Wir kommen nun zu der dritten These meines Vortrags: Empathie kann gezielt gelehrt und gelernt werden. Jüngste wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse belegen, dass Empathie eine erlernbare Fähigkeit ist. Die deutsche Neurowissenschaftlerin und Psychologin Tania Singer hat im Rahmen einer großangelegten Untersuchung, dem "ReSource-Projekt" am Max-Planck-Institut für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften die Wirkung von Meditation auf das Verhalten und die damit verbundenen Veränderungen im Gehirn untersucht. Die Idee, die hinter diesem Forschungsprojekt steht, war die Suche nach einer Möglichkeit, gezielt soziale Fähigkeiten wie Mitgefühl, Empathie und die "Theory of Mind" zu fördern. Die Untersuchung ging über einen Zeitraum von elf Monaten und bestand aus unterschiedlichen Modulen. Im "Präsenzmodul" lag der Schwerpunkt vor allem auf der Achtsamkeit gegenüber geistigen und körperlichen Prozessen. Das Modul "Perspektive" konzentrierte sich auf sozio-kognitive Fähigkeiten, insbesondere die Perspektivenübernahme. Ein drittes Modul "Affekte" sollte den konstruktiven Umgang mit schwierigen Emotionen sowie die Kultivierung positiver Emotionen schulen. Die Probanden führten die entsprechenden Übungen täglich mit ihren zugeordneten Partnern durch Telefonate oder Videoanrufe aus.Das Team um Tania Singer konnte nach den drei Monaten mithilfe von Gehirnscans eine tatsächliche Verbesserung der Kompetenzen der TeilnehmerInnen feststellen, die mit struktureller Gehirnplastizität in den spezifischen neuronalen Netzwerken einhergingen. Das sozio-affektive Modul konnte so tatsächlich zur Verbesserung der Fähigkeit des Mitgefühls beitragen. Das sozio-kognitive Modul hingegen hat die Fähigkeit verbessert, sich gedanklich in die Perspektive eines anderen zu versetzen. Die Studie hat gezeigt, dass Empathie und Mitgefühl erlernbare Kompetenzen sind, die durch entsprechende Übungen gezielt gefördert werden können. Dazu bedarf es jedoch zunächst einer Anerkennung von Empathie als einer erlernbaren Kompetenz.Fassen wir zusammen: Rechtspopulismus agiert immer über Feindbilder. Diese Feindbilder basieren auf der Konstruktion einer homogenen Feindgruppe. Durch Verallgemeinerung werden den Individuen innerhalb dieser Feindgruppe Subjektivität und Individualität abgesprochen und so die Entstehung von Empathie verhindert. Die rechtspopulistische Ungleichheitslogik schließt an die Ungleichheitslogiken unserer kapitalistischen Gesellschaftsordnung an. Die Wettbewerbs- und Konkurrenzideologie hat ein empathiefeindliches Umfeld geschaffen. Zudem hat sich die Bildung zu lange einseitig auf Rationalität konzentriert. Daher gilt es, Empathie als eine soziale und emotionale Fähigkeit mit kognitiven Anteilen im bildungswissenschaftlichen Diskurs zu verankern. So können rechtspopulistische Differenzierungskategorien wie Nationalität oder Religion sowie die Verallgemeinerungen zugunsten einer Fokussierung auf Gemeinsamkeiten und Mitmenschlichkeit überwunden werden. Um in einer vernetzten, globalisierten Welt intelligent handeln zu können, nützt ein Rückzug in nationalistische Freund-Feind-Denkweisen nicht. Vielmehr gilt es, auf Kooperation und Empathie zu setzen, auch wenn diese nicht immer messbar ist. Vielen Dank.Literatur- und Quellenverzeichnis:Allport, Gordon W. (1971): Die Natur des Vorurteils. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Bischof-Köhler, Doris (1989): Spiegelbild und Empathie. Die Anfänge der sozialen Kognition. Hans Huber: Berlin, Stuttgart, Toronto.Decker, Frank (2017): Populismus in Westeuropa. Theoretische Einordnung und vergleichende Perspektiven. In: Diendorfer, Gertraud u.a. (Hrsg.) (2017): Populismus – Gleichheit – Differenz. Herausforderungen für die politische Bildung. Schwalbach/Ts.: Wochenschau Wissenschaft, S. 11-28.Holtmann, Everhard (2018): Völkische Feindbilder, Ursprünge und Erscheinungsformen des Rechtspopulismus in Deutschland. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung.Mudde, Cas / Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira (2017): Populism. A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.Müller, Jan-Werner (2016): Was ist Populismus? Ein Essay. Berlin: Edition Suhrkamp.ReSource-Projekt: https://www.resource-project.org/ [10.09.2019]Wodak, Ruth (2016): Politik mit der Angst. Zur Wirkung rechtspopulistischer Diskurse. Wien/Hamburg: Edition Konturen.

Wird die DATI-Gründung doch noch zur Erfolgsgeschichte? Was das Ministerium von Bettina Stark-Watzinger endlich richtig macht, welche Unsicherheiten bleiben – und was vorher alles falsch lief: eine aktuelle Bestandsaufnahme.






Bild: Krill_makes_pics /
Pixabay.






ALS KURZ VOR WEIHNACHTEN die Entscheidung für Erfurt fiel, war kaum einer überrascht. Dass die
geplante Deutsche Agentur für Transfer und Innovation (DATI) in der thüringischen Landeshauptstadt angesiedelt werden könnte, machte schon monatelang die Runde, bevor das BMBF im Oktober
2023 die Besetzung der DATI-Gründungskommission bekanntgab. Zu deren Aufgaben die Entwicklung von Vorschlägen unter anderem für den Standort gehören sollte.



 



Ein Zeichen dafür, dass die Kommission, bestehend aus 16 Experten aus Politik, Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft, tatsächlich mehr Feigenblatt als Impulsgeber ist, der Scheinlegitimation bereits
feststehender DATI-Pläne im BMBF dient? Zu einer solchen Vermutung konnte auch kommen, wer eine interne, inhaltlich durchaus gelungene Arbeitsversion des
Agenturkonzepts las, die – datiert auf den 27. September 2023 – schon für den November die Befassung des Bundeskabinetts mit dem finalen Konzept vorsah. Auch an der Zusammensetzung des
Gremiums gab es Kritik vor allem von den HAWs, die sich als Urheber der DATI-Idee seit langem zunehmend an den Rand gedrängt fühlten.



 



Viel Optimismus
und gute Stimmung



 



Inzwischen hat die Gründungskommission sich viermal getroffen, sie hat Arbeitsgruppen unter anderem zu Governance und Förderformaten gebildet, und wer jetzt in die Gruppe der 16 hineinhorcht,
erlebt erstaunlich viel Optimismus und gute Stimmung. Man ist ins Arbeiten gekommen, der Konflikt zwischen HAWs und Universitäten ist nicht weg, aber leiser (siehe auch Kasten), man fühlt sich
vom BMBF ernstgenommen, und falls es im Ministerium einst den Plan gegeben haben sollte, die Empfehlungen der Kommission als netten Beischmuck abzutun, ist es damit definitiv vorbei.



 



Was auch daran zu erkennen ist, dass das BMBF das Bundeskabinett bis heute eben nicht mit einem fertigen Konzept befasst hat. Währenddessen hat die Gründungskommission den Text der
Ausschreibung für den wissenschaftlichen Chefposten der DATI fertiggestellt und in ihrer vierten Sitzung am Dienstag beschlossen. Sobald der Bundeshaushalt steht, dürfte sie veröffentlicht
werden. Und was die Standortwahl angeht: Zwar hat diese am Ende wie vorgesehen die Politik getroffen. Aber zuvor hatte die Kommission Erfurt selbst auf ihre in einem mehrstufigen Verfahren
entstandene, in geheimer Abstimmung verabschiedete finale Vierer-Vorschlagsliste gesetzt, weil die Stadt – neben anderen – etwa in Sachen Erreichbarkeit und wirtschaftlichem Umfeld einfach gut
passte. Die Konkurrenten waren Bochum, Dortmund und Potsdam.



 



"Das BMBF befindet sich in der Finalisierung des Konzepts und wird dies nach der Koordinierung mit den Ressorts dem Kabinett vorlegen", teilt eine Sprecherin auf Anfrage mit. Die Verzögerung
begründet sie mit der laufenden Pilot-Förderrichtlinie DATIpilot. Das Konzept solle deren Erkenntnisse, "insbesondere im Rahmen des Bewerbungs- und Auswahlverfahrens, substanziell mit
 miteinbeziehen und wurde entsprechend erweitert". 



 



Was unterwegs
alles schiefging



 



Nach mittlerweile fast zwei Jahren Irrungen und Wirrungen um die DATI, angefangen mit den ersten, "Grobkonzept" genannten Eckpunkten des damaligen BMBF-Staatssekretärs Thomas Sattelberger (FDP) im
März 2022, könnte es also doch noch ein Happy End geben. Mit der Gründung nicht irgendeiner Agentur, sondern einer Einrichtung, die wirklich Neues ermöglicht, vor allem andere
Entscheidungsverfahren in der Transfer- und Innovationsförderung. Wie bitter nötig ein solcher unabhängig vom Ministerium agierender Player wäre, zeigt ausgerechnet die vom Ministerium über
weite Strecken verpeilte DATI-Konzeptions- und Gründungsphase. Denn dass es jetzt besser läuft, kann nicht über die vielen Prozessfehler zuvor hinwegtäuschen.



 



o Nach dem Vorpreschen Sattelbergers und seinem Abschied als Staatssekretär Mitte 2022 versuchte sein Nachfolger Mario Brandenburg (ebenfalls FDP) zunächst, Struktur ins Verfahren zu bringen
und die Community über verschiedene Konferenzen und Formate zu beteiligen. An sich gut, doch blieben die Erwartungen etwa zwischen HAWs und Universitäten konträr, und der Handlungsdruck aus
der Wissenschaftsszene stieg weiter an, je länger konkrete Ansagen auf sich warten ließen.



 



o Um Dampf aus dem Kessel zu nehmen, kündigte Brandenburg im November 2022 eine aus zwei Modulen bestehende Pilotförderlinie an, um bereits Förderformate zu testen und Fördergelder zu
vergeben, bevor die DATI überhaupt existierte. Ähnlich war das BMBF in der vergangenen Legislaturperiode vor Gründung der Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen (SPRIND) vorgegangen. 



 



o Statt spätestens mit Ankündigung von "DATIpilot" die Gründungskommission einzuberufen, dokterte man fast ein weiteres Jahr am Gründungskonzept herum, was angesichts der jetzt erkannten
Bedeutung der Kommission als weiterer Zeitverlust einzustufen ist. Als die Gründungskommission schließlich berufen wurde, blieb das Verhältnis zwischen ihrem Wirken und den konzeptionellen
Arbeiten im BMBF zunächst unklar.



 



o Die Förderlinie, die dann erst Anfang Juli 2023
ausgeschrieben wurde, nahm wiederum mehr Zeit als geplant in Anspruch, verschärft durch eine Fehleinschätzung im BMBF zu ihrer Resonanz. Die erfreulich große Themenoffenheit bei der
Ausschreibung und die hohe Projektdotierung (150.000 Euro, bei zwei Partnern 300.000 Euro) resultierten beim Modul "Innovationssprints" in knapp 3000 Antragsskizzen, die im Rahmen einer
Vorauswahl erst mühsam auf 600 Bewerbungen heruntergebracht werden mussten. Fast alle davon präsentieren sich noch bis Februar in Form innovativer Roadshows. Dabei soll es insgesamt 150
Publikumssieger geben, erste Förderzusagen davon sind schon raus, weitere 150 Projekte werden Anfang März per Losverfahren bestimmt.



 



o Das BMBF brauchte so viel Zeit für Konzept und "DATIpilot", dass es 35 DATI-Millionen aus dem Haushalt 2023 verfallen ließ, denn der Bundestagshaushaltsausschuss hatte für deren Entsperrung das
Vorliegen eines "schlüssigen Konzepts" verlangt. Angesichts der enormen Resonanz auf die "Innovationssprints"-Ausschreibung hätte die Community das Geld gut nutzen können.
Eine BMBF-Sprecherin teilt mit, die benötigten Mittel stünden vorbehaltlich der Beschlussfassung über den Bundeshaushalt 2024 zur Verfügung. Die 2023-Millionen sind also passé. Und die
geplanten 78,8 Millionen für 2024 könnten knapp werden.



 



o Positiv: Wie der Wissenschaftsjournalist Manfred Ronzheimer im Tagesspiegel Background berichtete, wurde nach der überraschend
hohen Bewerberzahl der Fördertopf auf 90 Millionen Euro verdreifacht. Negativ: Die Roadshows fanden unter Ausschluss der Medien statt, laut Ronzheimer verweigerte das BMBF "aus
Datenschutzgründen" sogar die Auskunft, welche Projekte bereits eine Förderzusage erhalten haben.



 



o So erfreulich anders die Endauswahl bei den "Innovationssprints" lief, so wenig transparent war die Vorauswahl. Die Ausschreibung nannte als Kriterien die "Originalität", die
"gesellschaftliche Relevanz" und die "Umsetzbarkeit in der gegebenen Zeit", doch zu ihrer konkreten Operationalisierung macht das BMBF auch auf Nachfrage keine Aussage. Die aufgeführten Kriterien
seien "so angelegt, dass sie eine themenoffene und gleichzeitig qualitativ überzeugende Auswahl von Projekten gewährleisten", heißt es. Sie seien mit gleicher Gewichtung in die Bewertung der
Kurzskizzen eingeflossen. Als "grundsätzlich förderwürdig" seien Projektideen eingestuft worden, die alle drei Kriterien sehr gut erfüllten. Aber was genau bedeutet das? Wie erkennt man
Originalität? Die, so BMBF, "strukturierte Vorauswahl sei durch den Projektträger Jülich umgesetzt worden, "in enger Abstimmung" mit dem Ministerium, "wie es bei der Umsetzung vieler
BMBF-Förderrichtlinien üblich und bewährt ist". Tatsächlich sind aber auch bei BMBF-Ausschreibungen sehr häufig Peer-Review-Verfahren einbezogen.



 



Warten auf den
Bundeshaushalt



 



Vielleicht führt der Plan des BMBF, Erkenntnisse aus "DATIpilot" noch ins erweiterte Konzept einfließen zu lassen, ja auch genau dazu, die Unzulänglichkeiten der bisherigen Prozesse zu
erkennen – die Empfehlungen der Gründungskommission möglichst vollständig umzusetzen und anschließend der Agentur möglichst freie Hand zu lassen. Der diesbezügliche Optimismus unter etlichen
der 16 Experten spricht für das Ministerium von Stark-Watzinger und dessen eigene Lerneffekte. 



 



Eigentlich bis März, voraussichtlich aber eher bis April will die Kommission ihre Arbeit abschließen. Dann könnte auch bereits feststehen, wer die DATI führen wird. Eine große Unsicherheit bleibt
jedoch: Erst Anfang Februar steht der BMBF-Haushalt für 2024 endgültig. Und was ist, wenn die DATI im Laufe des Jahres doch noch vom zusätzlichen 200-Millionen-Spardruck durch die Globale Minderausgaben betroffen wird? Die Ministerin und ihr Staatssekretär Mario Brandenburg werden den zuletzt so erfolgreichen Vertrauensaufbau
energisch fortsetzen müssen.


Wie es bei "DATIpilot" weitergeht


Auch beim Modul "Innovationscommunities" hat es mit über 480 derart viele eingereichte Skizzen gegeben, dass sich das Auswahlverfahren zieht und wieder eine
rekordverdächtig niedrige Bewilligungsquote entstehen dürfte. Denn eigentlich sollen nur zehn zum Zuge kommen, für die es jeweils bis zu fünf Millionen Euro für die Dauer von vier Jahren
geben soll.

Im Frühjahr soll die Vorauswahl laufen, analog zu den Sprints. Doch es geht anders weiter. Die 70 verbliebenen Antragsteller mit den am vielversprechendsten
eingestuften Skizzen sollen im April zu einer Präsentation vor
dem BMBF und einer extern




besetzten Jury eingeladen werden. "Auf Basis der Vorbewertung und der Bewertung der Präsentation erfolgt die finale Auswahl" erläutert das BMBF, mit Entscheidung
und Förderzusage werde Ende April gerechnet. Die ausgewählten Communities können dann von Mai an  formale Förderanträge für konkrete Projekte stellen.



 



Der Ärger vieler HAWs, sie seien als Ideengeber der DATI von den Universitäten und außeruniversitären
Forschungseinrichtungen an den Rand worden, schien zuletzt anhand einer Quote von über 40 Prozent bei Bewerbungen und erfolgreicher Vorauswahl ein Stückweit abzukühlen.










Kostenfreien Newsletter abonnieren




In eigener Sache: Blog-Finanzierung














Welche guten Nachrichten ich in Sachen Blogfinanzierung habe, warum ich weiter dringend Ihre Unterstützung brauche – und welche Artikel im
Dezember am meisten gelesen wurden.



 



Mehr lesen...

The Army and Navy ships that have left the U.S. for a massive humanitarian aid project in Gaza are still making their way across the Atlantic, with two still at ports in Florida and Virginia. It will likely take until mid-April for the vessels to reach Gaza and begin building a temporary causeway to facilitate the entry of life-saving aid into the strip.Looking at real-time satellite imagery tracking military vessels, it looks like the USAV Gen. Frank Besson Jr., an Army support vessel that left Fort Eustis, Virginia, on March 10, has been moored and presumably refueling at a port in the Azores, Portugal, since Friday. It is at the half-way point between the U.S. and its final destination of Cyprus (nearly 5,000 nautical miles total). At an average speed of 10 knots, its journey will take nearly two more weeks, depending on weather conditions, once it gets going again.The rest of the vessels are behind and, as of Tuesday, halfway across the Atlantic, though they can travel at slightly higher speeds than the Besson. They include the Army support vessels Loux, Matamoros, Monterrey and Wilson Wharf, which are all traveling together and were between Bermuda and the Azores Tuesday morning. They all left U.S. ports around March 15. They are carrying modules and equipment to build the "trident" causeway — about 800 by 1200 feet — which will be anchored at the beach in Gaza to unload humanitarian aid.The USNV Roy Benavidez, which, once in place, will help construct the floating pier and serve as a "roll on, roll off" facility two miles off the coast of Gaza, is the fastest of all the military vessels and is now ahead of the smaller Army landing craft on their way to the Azores, even though it left Newport News, Va., on March 21. When complete, aid will be ferried from Cyprus to the floating pier and then to the causeway at Gaza.Meanwhile, two other Navy vessels that will be assisting with the floating pier, the USNSs Lopez and Bobo, are readying and still docked in Navy ports at Jacksonville and Norfolk respectively. Once on their way these particular vessels will take at least two weeks to reach Cyprus, depending on the weather and refueling at the Azores.All told these vessels (carrying about 500 U.S. military personnel) won't be realistically building anything until mid-April, which appears to be in line with a May completion date for the pier and the causeway. Considering that, according to experts, Gazans will be fully in the throes of famine by then, it is still hard to contemplate why the Biden administration has backed the massive JLOTS project instead of ratcheting up pressure on Israel to let in the thousands of trucks of aid that are stopped at borders and checkpoints. The Pentagon has not returned calls regarding whether the military has hired contractor Fogbow to engage in the logistics on the beach, as the Biden administration insists there will be no boots on the ground. The Times of Israel reported a day ago that Fogbow, which is led by recently retired U.S. Special Forces, Marines and intelligence officers, has already been hired for the job and that the Israel Defense Forces will likely handle security at the aid staging areas. This, too, has yet to be confirmed.Some are already questioning whether the U.S. military operation will be used to assist a massive refugee camp at the beach once the fighting begins in Rafah. Israel insists the millions of people now sheltering in the city will have to evacuate. The Pentagon has not yet said where the causeway and operations will take place. Stay tuned.

Thomas A. Berry and Nicholas DeBenedetto


In the Fall of 2020, public schools in Springfield, Missouri implemented mandatory "equity" training. All employees of the school district were required to attend a session, not just teachers. The employees were told that if they did not participate, the school district would dock their pay and they could lose necessary professional development credit.
The training topics included "Oppression, White Supremacy, and Systemic Racism" and tools on "how to become Anti‐​Racist educators." Training sessions included several interactive exercises that required participants to share reactions to videos, write down answers to instructor questions, answer multiple‐​choice questions, and fill out charts related to concepts presented by the training.
Brooke Henderson and Jennifer Lumley, two non‐​teacher employees, strongly disagreed with many of the views advanced by the school district through the training sessions. These sessions taught that believing in colorblindness is a form of white supremacy; that systemic racism is "woven into the very foundation of American culture, society, and laws"; and that American institutions all contribute to or reinforce "the oppression of marginalized social groups while elevating dominant social groups." Participants were also told that being sufficiently "anti‐​racist" means not remaining "silent or inactive" because doing so constitutes "white silence"—a form of white supremacy.
During training sessions, employees were required to answer questions and give responses affirming these assertions. For example, some of the questions presented two answers, only one of which was correct in the eyes of the school district. In order to advance through the modules and receive credit, participants had to give the school district‐​approved answer. To complete their training, Henderson and Lumley both gave many answers that they did not actually believe.
Henderson and Lumley, represented by the Southeastern Legal Foundation, filed suit and raised several claims under the First Amendment including compelled speech, content and viewpoint discrimination, and unconstitutional conditions of employment. But the district court held in favor of the school district and ruled that Henderson and Lumley would have to pay the school district over $300,000 in legal fees and sanctions.
Henderson and Lumley have appealed to the Eighth Circuit, and Cato has filed an amicus brief supporting that appeal. Our brief focuses on two aspects of the district court's decision that raise substantial First Amendment issues. First, the court's analysis of the plaintiffs' compelled speech claim conflicts with the Supreme Court's foundational decision in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). Barnette makes clear that a person suffers a First Amendment injury at the moment he or she is required to affirm a belief to which he or she objects. Plaintiffs repeatedly had to provide the "correct" response and profess agreement with the school district's ideas about equity, white supremacy, and racism, even though they strongly disagreed.
Second, the district court's decision to award attorneys' fees and sanctions violates the First Amendment right of the plaintiffs to participate in public‐​interest litigation. The district court justified its exorbitant award by referencing the​plaintiffs' desire to advance a political cause in this litigation. But the Supreme Court explicitly held in NAACP v. Button (1963) and In re Primus (1978) that advancing a cause through good‐​faith public‐​interest litigation is an important First Amendment right, not something to be punished. Penalizing litigants for exercising their First Amendment freedoms will only chill future good‐​faith litigation.
If allowed to stand, the district court's opinion would invite government employers to undermine key First Amendment principles and would chill legitimate public‐​interest litigation. The Eighth Circuit should correct these errors and reverse the decision of the district court.

Colleen Hroncich


It's hard to believe it's already "back to school" season. But the displays in every store are impossible to miss. This year's back to school experience could be a new one for many teachers, parents, and students as they have the chance to choose their own educational path for the first time. Finding high‐​quality resources is likely top of mind for many parents and teachers. That's where izzit​.org can come in handy.
izzit​.org is a non‐​profit that provides educators with engaging educational resources designed to help students develop critical thinking skills. I first learned about izzit​.org in 2015 through our speech and debate league, and I'm amazed at how many new resources are available every time I visit the website. Happily, these resources are available at no cost to anyone who is interested in teaching or learning—parents (including homeschoolers), grandparents, teachers, tutors, librarians, and more.
The video lessons were my first exposure to izzit​.org. Most of them are geared toward students in sixth grade and older. Subject areas include Business & Economics, Career Technical Education, Constitution & Civics, and Social Studies & Humanities. There is a special subset of videos aimed at elementary‐​aged students that features "Pups of Liberty." (I just watched my first Pups of Liberty episode, The Dog‐​claration of Independence, and was quite amused by Spaniel Adams, Paul Ruffere, the Minute Mutts, and the Red Cats.)
In keeping with izzit.org's educational mission, these aren't just standalone videos. There are short, online comprehension quizzes students can take at the end of each video. Some of the videos are part of Teaching Units that include teacher's guides. There are also Learning Modules, which are online, interactive collections that cover about a week's worth of material. Teachable Moments are short—typically five minutes or less—videos that focus on one topic and can be easily added to other lessons. Since the website allows you to sort by topic and grade level, it's easy for educators to find the content that will work best for a specific lesson.
More recently, izzit​.org has expanded to offer full courses. Civics Fundamentals is hosted by Judge Douglas Ginsburg, a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He answers the 100 questions in the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services naturalization test with two‐​minute videos that include an explanation of each answer. The course is supplemented with additional materials, including a Jeopardy‐​style game and flash cards.
izzit​.org also boasts a first‐​in‐​the‐​nation career readiness course—Workforce Innovation Now, or W.I.N.. This unique course blends financial literacy, employability, skill mastery, and work‐​based learning experiences. It's divided into nine units that include videos, quizzes, essay prompts, and other student assignments (including resume‐​drafting guidance).
To help teachers make the most of the incredible izzit​.org resources, the website includes free Professional Development (PD) webinars. Teachers can receive certificates of participation for each PD they complete.
In addition to the video resources, izzit​.org offers two current events lessons each school day. The lessons feature articles from various major news sources to encourage debate and critical thinking. Typically one is easier to read and the other is more challenging. The articles may include uncomfortable or unpopular topics. The goal is for students to read, process, debate, and think critically about these issues. The lessons include questions to help drive discussions.
Whether you're a full‐​time teacher, a homeschooler, or a parent looking for additional learning opportunities for your children, izzit​.org is an amazing resource. As I really explored the site for this post, I realized we missed out on some great content by not using it more. So learn from my mistake—and check it out today!

There is no way that the floating causeway the U.S. military wants to build connecting to the beach at Gaza won't require "boots on the ground" say experts, putting another major question mark on the humanitarian surge project announced by the administration last week.Details have emerged in recent days that the Pentagon plans to build a floating "trident" style causeway out of modular pieces that are en route from Ft. Eustis, Virginia, to Cyprus as we speak. But according to experts like Sal Mercogliano, a former merchant mariner, professor, and host of the "What's Going on with Shipping" podcast, the floating causeway project is going to be a massive endeavor to build and will require daily maintenance from personnel on the beach once put into place."The problem with this one it is not as durable (as a permanent non-floating elevated causeway system) and it has to be maintained. You can't just set it up and leave it alone, you got to be constantly monitoring it, resetting anchors on it. It takes a lot to keep this system up and running. It is not something you just set up and walk away. You also got to have people ashore for it," he said on an earlier podcast before the Trident floating option was actually confirmed by the Pentagon."I'm not sure how the DoD is going to get away with this without having people on the beach," he continued. "There's got to be some interaction here. You can have some people maybe do it for you, but I'm telling you, to do this right, and professionally, you got to put people ashore."There have been numerous reports that private contractor Fog Bow has been tapped to help "organize the movement of aid after it arrives on the Gaza shore." This has not been confirmed by the DoD and the press office did not return a request for comment by RS. Fog Bow, which is run by retired Marine Corps Lt. General Sam Mundy, and Mick Mulroy, former CIA and Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East under the Trump administration, has been mentioned in several stories as talking with the Biden administration (if not already on board), and already raising money to start assisting with both private and government aid deliveries to Gaza.Looking at its team page, Fog Bow certainly has the background for providing logistics and even security for deliveries, but the question remains who might be providing the construction and maintenance support for the floating causeway on the beach that Mercogliano mentioned in his podcast.Another big question mark is the timing. As Mercogliano mentioned, there are are series of Army cargo watercraft sailing what will be an arduous journey from the U.S. to Cyprus. The craft are weighed down with supplies for the construction and will take at least 30 days to arrive (the clock started ticking on March 12). There are two massive Army ships called Landing Support Vehicles (Besson and Loux) which are traveling at about nine knots to Cyprus and are being accompanied by three smaller Landing Craft Utility ships carrying equipment (most likely the modules) and a roll-on roll off vessel that can also serve as a "mother ship," according to Mercogliano. Timing for the project depends on the ships with the slowest speeds and those are the big LCVs.Once the ships get to Cyprus, they will have to be inspected no doubt before the construction process — for the floating pier two miles off the Gaza coast, and then the floating causeway at the beach — can take place. Then there are the security issues, which Mercogliano says are real and haven't been fully accounted for in any Pentagon briefing. Right now there is no guarantee that Hamas will not attempt to attack the pier and no clear answer of who, if U.S. troops won't be on the ground, will be providing that security. Fog Bow? Another private contracting outfit? Biden said last week that Israel was to provide the security but that has yet to be confirmed by Israeli officials. Then this report Friday indicated that Israel was also exploring the use of private security contractors, with the U.S. Neither side would confirm that.It makes one ask, why all the trouble? Why not get the Israelis to open up and let in the upward of 2,500 aid trucks waiting at the Al-Arish gate in Rafah (as witnessed by Gen. Michael Kurilla, US. Central Command, on March 7)? Why wait 60 days or more to build structures and create new security dilemmas when the population in Gaza is slipping into famine as each day goes by?"It is not easy. It's going to take a long time to do we're talking about weeks if not months to set this up. It's going to be expensive," said Mercogliano. "This is going to be millions of dollars to go ahead and get this up, let alone the food supply. And then there's the security issue, the risk, because even though you heard (DoD spokesman) Gen. Ryder say they're not gonna put American, you know, boots on the ground, they're gonna be right there There's a lot of issues associated with this."Interestingly, both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were raising concerns last week about the lack of information provided by the military."I hate to say it, but I think this decision was politically driven by the president after Michigan," said Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said noting the president's poor showing in the primary elections there. "And he's trying to be forward-leaning to try to do something to help the folks in Gaza from a humanitarian standpoint, but this is moving really fast and nobody can explain how it's gonna work."Sen. Richard Blumenthal, senior Democratic member of the committee from Connecticut, said he is "convinced that this kind of humanitarian effort is absolutely necessary," but he has "very serious questions about how the construction will be done, with the assurance of safety to our troops."Nonetheless, hundreds of Army soldiers from the 7th Transportation Brigade, left on Mar. 12, from Newport News, Virginia. The orders came as a "shock" to families. Chief Warrant Officer Three Jason West shared what he told his three children, ages 15, 9 and 6. "We told them that we're going to provide humanitarian aid for people that are in need. And that we're going across the ocean. We'll be back as soon as we're done."

Muhammad Zia Mehmood is a PhD candidate in the Business and Public Policy Program at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. In his job market paper, Zia studies the demand for and potential of business trainings provided over text messages to impact outcomes for micro-entrepreneurs in Kenya. This study was supported by CEGA's Development Economics Challenge initiative. This blog post was originally published on the Econ That Really Matters blog.A small business welder at work. Credit: Adobe StockIntroductionSmall businesses form the economic backbone of low-income countries and strengthening these enterprises is fundamental to alleviating poverty. Poor management practices is a major factor constraining firm productivity in these contexts, and over $1 billion is spent annually to address this constraint by providing business trainings to entrepreneurs. However, most of these are conventional, in-person, classroom-style trainings, which are expensive and hard to scale, and can exclude those who are unable to participate in person. Due to their low costs, scalability, and reach, phone-based trainings are gaining popularity as a potential solution, but there is limited evidence on whether remotely provided trainings are effective for micro-entrepreneurs in low-income settings.In my job market paper, I study the demand for and potential of text message-based business trainings using a field experiment in Kenya, in which access to an SMS-based training was randomized across 4,700 micro-entrepreneurs. I estimate short- and longer-run impacts using phone-based surveys conducted three months (Midline: 307 observations) and twelve months (Endline: 2,780 observations) after the intervention. I also elicit ex ante predictions for 12-month treatment effects from researchers through the Social Science Predictions Platform (SSPP), to assess whether the main findings depart from existing priors. Finally, I measure demand for the trainings through Take-It-Or-Leave-It (TIOLI) offers and the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) willingness-to-pay elicitation method for a subset of the sample.Context and InterventionAccording to a 2016 nationwide survey of small businesses in Kenya, 90 percent of micro-entrepreneurs had never received any type of business training. This was reflected in their business practices: More than three-fourths did not advertise any of their products, over two-thirds didn't keep any business records, and less than a tenth accounted for prices set by their competitors when choosing their own prices.I partnered with a local firm specializing in digital content development and dissemination to implement an SMS-based training aimed at addressing these management gaps and others. Available in English and Swahili, the training modules covered best practices, including marketing, advertising, pricing, record-keeping, and stock management. The content was structured around stories about the decisions of hypothetical micro-entrepreneurs in different scenarios. Users accessed the trainings through self-paced engagement with an interactive chat-bot, which sent bite-sized chunks spanning about 150 text messages. The entire training could be completed in five to seven hours, and all content was retained indefinitely on users' phones. Weekly text reminders were sent to those who stopped engaging, and these reminders stopped if engagement was resumed or after two consecutive months of inactivity.The primary sample for the study was sourced from a list of micro-entrepreneurs compiled by my implementation partner and a local microfinance institution. Half of the study sample consists of female micro-entrepreneurs, and roughly 45 percent is based in rural areas. The average individual was about 35 years old, and had completed almost twelve years of education (high school level).Figure 1: Screenshots of user engagement with the chatbot. Note: This figure shows screenshots of interactions with the SMS-based chatbot as it pushes out content to users. In this context, most micro-entrepreneurs set prices just based on their buying costs, without accounting for prices of their competitors, so the content pushes them to change their pricing strategy. Credit: Muhammad Zia MehmoodResultsThree months after the intervention, I find that the SMS training increased knowledge and adoption of best practices by 0.20 and 0.33 standard deviations, respectively. I also find large positive, but statistically insignificant, effects on business performance in the overall sample, and significant positive effects for younger (below-median) micro-entrepreneurs on sales (109 percent increase), profits (38 percent increase), and business survival (11.6 percentage points increase). These positive effects for younger entrepreneurs are driven by higher engagement with the content, and larger effects on time spent on business, and loan amounts applied for and received.However, these positive results dissipate in the longer run; twelve months after the intervention, I see no effects on knowledge and adoption of best practices, as well as business sales, profits and survival. Additionally, the positive effects on business outcomes observed for younger entrepreneurs at three months disappear after twelve months. The lack of long-term impact was likely driven by micro-entrepreneurs abandoning all interactions with the content within the first few months of the intervention. The survival curve in Figure 2 shows how all cumulative aggregate engagement with the platform ended by May 2022 — five months into the intervention.Figure 2: Survival curve of interactions with chatbot. Note: This figure illustrates how interactions with the chatbot were distributed throughout the study period. The plot shows reverse cumulative engagement over time; for example, it shows that 80% of all the interactions with the chat-bot throughout the course of the study, had ended by 4/1/2022. The shaded areas represent the time-spans during which the Midline and Endline surveys were conducted. Credit: Muhammad Zia MehmoodFigure 3: Predictions vs observed treatment effects. Note: This figure shows how predicted treatment effects for the Endline compare with observed Midline and Endline effects. Error bars represent 90% confidence intervals. Credit: Muhammad Zia MehmoodFigure 3 illustrates how these results compare with predictions for 12-month treatment effects elicited ex ante through the SSPP. I find that SSPP researchers overestimated the engagement levels, both in terms of the proportion of the treatment group that would start engaging with the content (50 percent vs 30 percent) and how much training content the average user would complete after twelve months (40 percent vs 7 percent). Furthermore, predictions for the 12-month treatment effects on knowledge and adoption of best practices are somewhat similar to observed effects at three months, but significantly overestimated in light of observed 12-month treatment effects. Effects on business performance offer a similar story: SSPP predictions for the 12-month treatment effects on sales and profits are similar in magnitude to effects observed at three months (albeit statistically insignificant), but they grossly overestimate the effects at twelve months.Additionally, notwithstanding the low engagement and lack of longer-run effects, I find positive demand for SMS-based trainings among micro-entrepreneurs; both methods of elicitation — the TIOLI offers and the BDM exercise — reveal that individuals are willing to pay a small amount for an additional SMS-based training, suggesting that they value access to the content.Policy ImplicationsThese results indicate that SMS-based trainings are unlikely to improve outcomes for micro-entrepreneurs in the long run, despite their growing popularity in low-income and less accessible settings. These findings also highlight the lack of engagement with trainings as a major challenge that limits the potential of remotely-provided information-based support.Further, the forecasting exercise reveals that social science researchers overestimate the potential of SMS-based trainings to improve outcomes for micro-entrepreneurs, and the findings from this study are thus contrary to priors. Updating these priors is important because policymakers and practitioners often rely on social science experts to make decisions about how to invest in remote, information-based support programs.Lastly, the results on willingness to pay suggest that engagement with the content might not reflect the actual demand for SMS-based trainings, pointing towards possible behavioral drivers constraining engagement. To capitalize on the full potential of digital content delivery in low-income settings, further research is needed to shed light on how to encourage engagement with remotely provided content.Short Messages Fall Short for Micro-Entrepreneurs: Experimental Evidence from Kenya was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Die Lehrerbildung befindet sich inmitten des größten Umbruchs seit vielen Jahren. Aber schaffen es die Kultusminister, ihren Reformen eine stimmige und gemeinsame Richtung zu geben? Die Ständige Wissenschaftliche Kommission der KMK präsentiert dazu ihr lange erwartetes Gutachten.






Foto: Katerina Holmes, Pexels.






LANGE GEPLANT kommt das Gutachten jetzt mit einer Aktualität, die man sich gar nicht hat wünschen können: Drei Tage nach Bekanntgabe der historisch schlechten deutschen PISA-Ergebnisse veröffentlichte das wichtigste wissenschaftliche
Beratungsgremium der Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) am Freitagmittag seine Empfehlungen "zur Lehrkräftegewinnung und Lehrkräftebildung für einen hochwertigen Unterricht". Zuvor hatten die 16
Experten der Ständigen Wissenschaftlichen hin Kommission (SWK) ihr Gutachten in vertraulicher Runde den Kultusministern vorgestellt.



 



Die Vorschläge der SWK kommen auf den ersten Blick teilweise wenig radikal daher, doch würde ihre Umsetzung die Schulen in Deutschland nachhaltig verändern – und die KMK gleich mit. 



 



Insgesamt elf Empfehlungen umfasst das Gutachten, sortiert nach vier Kapiteln. Mit die wichtigste Forderung: Es muss endlich eine vernünftige Datenbasis her. Denn bislang ist die KMK noch
jedesmal von der Entwicklung der bundesweiten Schülerzahlen überrascht worden, auch hat sie die Änderungen der bildungspolitischen Rahmenbedingungen (etwa den Ausbau von Inklusion oder
Ganztagsschule) nie ausreichend in ihren Modellierungen abgebildet. Im Gegensatz etwa zu den Prognosen, die der Essener Bildungsforscher Klaus Klemm im Auftrag der Bertelsmann-Stiftung erstellt
hat und die fast immer näher an den tatsächlichen Lehrerbedarf herankamen. 



 



"Sonst kommen wir nie zu
einer verlässlichen Prognose"



 



Warum? Lange hatte die KMK ihrer Modellrechnungen zu selten aktualisiert, das immerhin hat sie inzwischen abgestellt und sammelt die Rückmeldungen der Bundesländer in jährlichem Abstand
(allerdings ist aktuelle Veröffentlichung weit überfällig). Doch ändert dies laut Olaf Köller, dem Ko-Vorsitzenden der SWK, nichts daran, dass die Grundlage der KMK-Berechnungen, die
Länderzumeldungen, nicht so recht zusammenpassen. "Es fehlt die Transparenz über in die Annahmen, die die Länder jeweils ihren Prognosen zugrundelegen", sagt Köller, im Hauptberuf Direktor des
IPN Leibniz-Instituts für die Pädagogik der Naturwissenschaften und der Mathematik. "Darum müssen die Daten künftig systematisch und vergleichbar in allen Ländern erhoben werden, unter
Berücksichtigung des tatsächlichen Bedarfs, und alle Länder müssen etwaige Datenlücken schließen, sonst kommen wir nie zu einer verlässlichen Prognose."




Eine solche Systematik würde freilich eine andere KMK voraussetzen: eine, die in der Lage ist, die für eine Vergleichbarkeit nötigen Datendefinitionen herzustellen und, in Form ihrer
Verwaltung, des KMK-Sekretariats, dann selbstbewusst von den Ländern die nötige Datenqualität einzufordern. Was, nebenbei gesagt, nur beschleunigen würde, was die Kultusminister
bei ihrem Treffen in Berlin ohnehin, je nach Bundesland und Perspektive mehr oder weniger begeistert, diskutiert haben: die überfällige grundlegende Reform der KMK, ihrer Prozesse und Verfasstheit.



 



Zweites großes Thema des SWK-Gutachtens: den Ausbildungserfolg der Lehramtsstudierenden erhöhen. Auch hier, das zeigte zuletzt eine Analyse des
Stifterverbandes eindrucksvoll, handelt es sich zu einem guten Teil um ein Datenproblem. Viele lehrerbildende Universitäten können nämlich gar nicht sagen, wie viele ihrer
Lehramt-Studienanfänger bis zum Abschluss kommen – geschweige denn, warum sie zu welchem Zeitpunkt entscheiden, doch nicht Lehrer zu werden. Von einer "großen Forschungs- und Datenlücke", die es
zu füllen gelte, sprach im Sommer der Stifterverband, "denn nur auf Basis belastbarer Befunde können bildungspolitische Maßnahmen ergriffen werden, die letztendlich einen Bildungsnotstand
verhindern."



 



Genau diese Datenlücke will die SWK schließen und fordert, die Studierbarkeit der Lehramtsstudiengänge müsse "datengestützt" verbessert werden, zudem müsse die soziale und akademische Integration
in die Hochschulen gestärkt werden. Das entscheidende Mittel für beides: ein funktionierendes Qualitätsmanagement und verlässliche Abstimmungsstrukturen, die auch die erste Phase der
Lehrerbildung, das Studium, mit der zweiten, dem Vorbereitungsdienst, verbinden. Beide Phasen laufen bislang oft nebeneinander, umso mehr gilt das für die dritte, die Fort- und Weiterbildung der
bereits berufstätigen Lehrer. 



 



Hoffnung
Ein-Fach-Lehrer



 



Womit die SWK beim Kern ihrer Empfehlungen angekommen ist, der künftigen Gestaltung der Studiengänge, man könnte auch sagen: ihrer zumindest teilweisen Neugestaltung. Denn die Experten empfehlen,
neben dem klassischen grundständigen Studium einen "wissenschaftsbasierten, qualifizierten zweiten Weg in den Lehrkraftberuf" zu eröffnen. Oder weniger verklausuliert formuliert: den seit einer
Weile viel diskutierten Ein-Fach-Lehrer einzuführen. Genaus das hatte der Wissenschaftsrat im Sommer bereits im Sommer
vorgeschlagen, allerdings nur bezogen aufs Mathematikstudium.



 



Das Modell der SWK ist schnell erklärt: Bewerber haben einen fachlichen Bachelor oder Master, beispielsweise in Germanistik. Dann starten sie in einen viersemestrigen Master of Education,
der ihnen das gesamte pädagogische Rüstzeug mitgibt, um Lehrer zu werden: die Fachdidaktik, die Bildungswissenschaften, dazu die Praktika und einen Spezialisierungsbereich wie Digitalisierung,
Inklusion, Sprachbildung oder Berufsorientierung. Nach diesem Master folgt der Übergang in ein reguläres Referendariat und anschließend die volle Lehrbefähigung – allerdings nur für ein Fach.



 



Berufsbegleitend soll es dann die Option geben, ein zweites Fach hinzuzustudieren – aber nicht verpflichtend. "Hier setzen wir auf die Motivation der Lehrkräfte", sagt die
Berliner Professorin für Schulpädagogik, Felicitas Thiel, neben Köller Vorsitzende der SWK. Hier dürfte das Gutachten der Kommission größere Diskussionen auslösen: Andere
Erziehungswissenschaftler warnen nämlich davor, dass Ein-Fach-Lehrer in den Schulen zu einseitig belastet würden, den Unterrichtsbedarf nicht ausreichend abbilden und die Stundenplanorganisation
verkomplizieren könnten. Weshalb ihre Ausbildung, wenn man sie zulasse, mit der Verpflichtung einhergehen müsse, ein zweites Fach nachzuholen. Doch schon der Wissenschaftsrat hatte diese Gründe
nicht als plausibel genug für eine verpflichtende Zweit-Fach-Weiterbildung erachtet.



 



In jedem Fall aber ist diese SWK-Empfehlung für die Schulwirklichkeit wohl die weitreichendste. Denn auch wenn es hier und da bereits gut funktionierende wissenschaftliche Aufbau-Masterprogramme
gibt: Vielerorts besteht derzeit nur die Wahl zwischen dem traditionellen Lehramtsstudium und aus der Not geborenen Seiteneinsteiger-Programmen, die zwar flexibel sind, denen jedoch vielfach, wie
nicht nur die SWK klagt, die Wissenschaftsbasierung fehlt. Würde es der KMK gelingen, einen Ein-Fach-Lehramt nach einheitlichen Maßstäben zu etablieren, wäre der Zugang zum Lehramtsstudium
dauerhaft flexibler – auch über den aktuellen dramatischen Lehrkräfte-Mangel hinaus. 



 



Absage an ein
duales Lehramtsstudium



 



Für die Debatten unter den Kultusministern schon bei der Vorstellung des SWK-Gutachtens dürfte unterdessen gesorgt haben, dass die Experten einem anderen bei Bildungspolitik und lehrerbildenden
Hochschulen in Mode gekommenen Reformvorhaben eine Absage erteilen: dem dualen Lehramtsstudium. "Wir können nicht verstehen, wo da eigentlich die Euphorie herkommt", sagt Felicitas Thiel.
Schon außerhalb des Lehramts gelinge in dualen Studiengängen die Verschränkung von Theorie und Praxis nicht wirklich gut, hinzu komme: "Wer soll, wenn wir an manchen Schule nur noch zehn Prozent
grundständig ausgebildete Lehrkräfte haben, noch nebenbei die aufwändige Begleitung dual Studierender übernehmen?"



 



Anders sieht das unter anderem der Wissenschaftsrat, der, schwer kritisiert unter anderem vom Deutschen Philologenverband, im Sommer seine Empfehlungen zur Zukunft des Matheunterrichts vorgelegt
hatte, inklusive einem Plädoyer zur Entwicklung des dualen Studiums.



 



Ebenfalls keine Unterstützung von der SWK erhalten Überlegungen, komplette Lehramtsstudiengänge zumindest für die beruflichen Schulen auch an Hochschulen für angewandte Wissenschaften laufen
zu lassen. "Es gibt bereits 34 Universitätsstandorte, die in der Lehrerbildung mit HAWs kooperieren", sagt SWK-Mitglied Isabell van Ackeren, Professorin für Bildungssystem- und
Schulentwicklungsforschung an der Universität Duisburg-Essen, die an der Ausarbeitung des Gutachtens maßgeblich beteiligt war. Um ausreichend wissenschaftsbasiert und berufsfeldbezogen zu sein,
sagt sie, würde die Abwicklung eines kompletten Lehramtsstudiums aber erhebliche zusätzliche personelle Ressourcen und organisationale Strukturen an den HAWs erfordern. "Das halten wir nicht für
zielführend, weitere Kooperationen hingegen schon."



 



Wofür die SWK sich indes ausspricht: die Einführung sogenannter Assistenz-Lehrkräfte, die auf der Grundlage eines Bachelorabschlusses und einer Weiterqualifizierung an die Schulen kommen könnten.
Ohne Berechtigung zum eigenständigen Unterricht, aber in Anbindung und zur Unterstützung an eine voll qualifizierte Lehrkraft. Eine Idee, die so ähnlich schon vor zwei Jahrzehnten mit der
Einführung der Bologna-Studiengänge im Lehramt diskutiert wurde, sich aber nie hat durchsetzen können.



 



Zweite Chance für die
Assistenz-Lehrkraft?



 



"Anders als damals gibt es jetzt aber ein funktionierendes Vorbild aus der Medizin, den Physician Assistent als zusätzliche Karriereoption für Pflegekräfte", sagte Felicitas Thiel. "Das hat macht
uns optimistisch, dass wir es jetzt auch in der Lehrerbildung schaffen, in einem vielfältigeren System von Karrierewegen zu denken, mit unterschiedlichen Verantwortlichkeiten in der Schule, aber
immer auf Augenhöhe." Eine Debatte darüber, so Thiel, sei überfällig – auch um klare Kriterien und Kompetenzen festzulegen.



 



Apropos klare Kriterien: Länder wie Brandenburg etablieren bereits neue, stark umtstrittene Lehrer-Laufbahnen auf Bachelorebene – allerdings dann mit vollständiger Lehrbefähigung. "Genau das
wollen wir nicht", betont Thiel – wohl ahnend, dass die SWK-Vorschläge genau mit solchen Modellen in einen Topf geworfen werden könnten, etwa von den Lehrergewerkschaften.



 



Und sonst? Schlagen die SWK-Experten vor, den Vorbereitungsdienst einheitlich auf zwölf Monate zu verkürzen, allerdings nur unter Voraussetzung eines Gesamtkonzepts, das wie gefordert erste und
zweite Phase und Berufseinstieg sowie Theorie und Praxis besser verknüpft, vor allem in Form eines über die Phasen hinweg kohärenten Curriculums, das außerdem Mentoren und Fachseminarleiter
wissenschaftsbasiert qualifiziert und die Unterrichtsverpflichtung während Referendariat und Berufseinstieg möglichst gering hält.



 



Außerdem fordert die Kommission einen ländergemeinsamen Qualitätsrahmen für ein in sich stimmiges, qualitätsgesichertes Forbildungssystem, von dem die SWK das Bildungssystem trotz einer
(theoretischen) Fortbildungsverpflichtung in allen Ländern weit entfernt sieht. Stichworte sind hier zertifizierte Module der wissenschaftlichen Weiterbildung etwa für ein weiteres
Unterrichtsfach in Mangelfächern, für andere Unterrichtsbereiche, für eine sonderpädagogische Fachrichtung oder zur Nachqualifizierung für eine andere Schulform, außerdem der Ausbau von
Master- und Promotionsstudiengänge etwa für Leitungspositionen und Koordinationsfunktionen. 



 



Dicke Bretter,
klare Ansagen



 



Dicke Bretter und klare Ansagen – in dem, was die SWK gut heißt, genauso aber, wovon sie abrät. Jetzt ist es an der Bildungspolitik. Im März wollen die Kultusminister ihren eigenen Aufschlag zur
Zukunft der Lehrerbildung beschließen, auf der Grundlage des SWK-Gutachtens und weiteren Papieren wie den Empfehlungen des Wissenschaftsrats zum Mathestudium. Auch der
Stifterverband hatte vor wenigen Wochen einen ambitionierten Reformkatalog vorgelegt. 



 



Vieles von dem Vorgeschlagenen, werden die Kultusminister argumentieren, gebe es schon. Stimmt. Allerdings, und das ist der entscheidende Punkt der SWK-Experten, fehlt derzeit zweierlei in der
deutschen Lehreraus- und weiterbildung: Stimmigkeit und Systematik. Beides will das neue Gutachten erreichen. Ob die KMK ihm folgen kann, selbst wenn die Kultusminister es wollten? So, wie sie im
Augenblick ist, an vielen Stellen vermutlich nicht. Ein Grund mehr, sie zu reformieren. 



Nachtrag am 08. Dezember, 12.45 Uhr:



Was die Kultusminister zum SWK-Gutachten sagen




Von einer "klaren Positionierung für hohe Qualitätsstandards in der Lehrkräftebildung", sprach KMK-Präsidentin Katharina Günther-Wünsch (CDU), im Hauptberuf Berliner
Bildungssenatorin. "Die Kultusministerkonferenz wird sich eingehend mit den vorgeschlagenen Empfehlungen auseinandersetzen und entsprechende Maßnahmen formulieren." Zur Absage der SWK an ein
duales Lehramtsstudium sagte Günther-Wünsch, der Begriff der Dualität sei ungünstig gewählt. Nichts desto trotz gebe es Debatten in den Bundesländern über die Verkürzung der Studiendauer und
Verknüpfung der Praxisanteile, und man werde darüber nun mit der SWK weiterdiskutieren, vielleicht dann unter einer anderen Überschrift als "duales Studium". 



 



Hamburgs Schulsenator Ties Rabe, der die SPD-Bildungspolitik in den Ländern koordiniert, sagte: "Die Idee, neben dem klassischen Lehramtsstudium einen zweiten Weg mit einem neuen
Studiengang in den Lehrberuf zu eröffnen, erschließt ganz neue Chancen für Studierende." Die Verkürzung des Referendariats durch eine bessere Verzahnung von Studium und Praxis sollte sorgfältig
geprüft werden. 



 



Rabes Gegenüber auf CDU-Seite, Hessens Kultusminister Alexander Lorz, sagte, er begrüße insbesondere die Ansätze, "neue Personengruppen für den Beruf als Lehrkraft zu
erschließen, ohne dabei den Qualitätsanspruch aus dem Blick zu verlieren". Die etablierte und qualitätsgesicherte grundständige Ausbildung unserer zukünftigen Lehrerinnen und Lehrer durch
alternative Formen zu gefährden, lehnt die SWK ab. "Dem schließe ich mich an." 



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Ivan: Thank you.
WP: Could you tell us a little bit more about the LGBTI community in Panama and the types of challenges LGBTI individuals face in building and maintaining a community?
I: We are a country between Costa Rica, who just last month legalized civil marriage for same sex couples, and Colombia, a country with equal marriage since April 2016. We're a part of that less of the 30% of Latin Americans who live in a territory where marriage equality is prohibited. Moreover, are known for public policies that takes into consideration LGBTI persons.
The challenges, there are many. As a gay person, for example, I'm not protected by any non-discrimination law, or the gender identity of the trans community is not part of what is respected by the government. There is unfortunately still a lot of stigma and discrimination for being queer.
We're a small country where there's a strong control from conservatives and religious groups, but what are the good news, I guess? The civil society is finally organized, and organizations like Fundación Iguales are doing a marvelous work promoting the respect of our human rights, creating community, helping the LGBTIQ community to be more visible, and therefore more respected by the general public.
We start a legal process to have marriage equality in Panama since 2016. We are very optimistic we will conquer in the courts and in the public opinion, by strategic innovative and emphatic messages of equality.
WP: You alluded briefly to how Fundación is contributing to building and strengthening the community in Panama. Could you discuss the facts a little bit more about how Fundación is contributing to and strengthening during these uncertain times?
I: First of all, with positive messages and with a clear presence in national conversations about the measures during the pandemic, highlighting the reality of LGBTI persons. We have had a very tough situation with restriction based on sex to restrain mobility of people here in Panama, and that had impacted dramatically the trans community and the nonbinary community of Panama, in some cases affecting their access to food and medicines. Yes, to be able to even go to the supermarket and buy bread and milk.
We decided to join forces with other organizations, specifically with an organization called Hombres Trans Panamá. It's an organization conformed by trans men to create a solidarity network. The network was created for two main activities. The first one, it is to assist directly trans and non binary people who register for humanitarian assistance. We already covered 120 people who were in need of food and medicines.
The second part of that program is an online survey to register discrimination cases for the trans community during the quarantine time. We have already had the report of 26 cases, mostly of trans person who were restricted to enter supermarkets to buy food because their gender identity or expression did not match what the police "expect" from them that day. That report was sent to the government, to regional organizations that monitor human rights, and we hope that impact possibly their lives.
For other programs that Fundación Iguales is promoting during this times of pandemic, one that is very important is a series of podcasts called Panademia LGBTIQ+, a program of Fundación Iguales with [foreign language 00:06:20], which is an independent group of journalists to highlight stories of LGBTI persons during these times, telling their stories, especially the trans community.
WP: That sounds like a lot of excellent work and strengthening the collaboration between groups has been really effective, I think, in this COVID pandemic situation.
I: Indeed.
WP: You alluded briefly to these podcasts. Are there other forms of technology that Fundación is using to continue the work that you're doing?
I: Yes, and that's very interesting because we have to reinvent our work, basically. Just before COVID, we finished a super nice, unprecedented program going through the different provinces of Panama that we call the human rights tour, with the idea to be more democratic on the contents of human rights, specifically talking about Inter-American Court of Human Rights decision on equal marriage and gender identity, the Advisory Opinion 24. It was such a success and we planned to right away continue around the whole country. With this situation we have, being confined at home with mobility restrictions, we have to change all that, but we were lucky to have a strong presence in social media with a robust content that we were able to share and build from it. Also, our capacity of doing initiatives jointly with other NGOs like I mentioned before and you highlight, were also key to show the work that we were doing on respecting human rights.
That coordination and collaborations, like the podcast example, the solidarity network, the level of infographic videos and social media interactions of Fundación Iguales are very solid. Since we dedicate an important part of our work to be present in national and international platforms for political participation, that allowed us to be more visible and not to be forget during these complicated times,
WP: It sounds that you've been able to pivot pretty smoothly and quickly, despite I'm sure what have appeared to be challenges that we're all facing during the pandemic.
Would you be willing to talk about kind of the role and benefits of partnering with international organizations such as NDI in your work?
I: When I started Fundación Iguales, I was very privileged to know that working with international organizations like NDI was essential. I lived almost eight years in Washington, D.C., And before that I studied in New York City, and I worked for almost eight years in multilateral organizations. That experience gave me a different look to understand how, and how specifically a country like Panama, a country with so many challenges, with the lack of the government support and local support, I would say, organizations and enterprises and so on ... so for me, it was very important to know that a key part of my work was to knock some doors abroad because it's essential to boost the work that we do here. Definitely, without the help, assistance, donations and more important, the moral support of embassies and organizations like NDI, our work would have been way more difficult than what actually is.
WP: As NDI, we like to partner and collaborate with our partners and recognize you as the experts and provide the technical assistance and guidance as needed. So it's good to hear that this has been beneficial for Fundación. My last question is about what's next for Fundación?
I: We're very focused that we want a social change for our country in a social change for good. We want a Panama where all persons will be respected and where they can all be happy. We want Panama to join the club of countries where same sex couples can have the support and protection of the government, and more importantly, where society in general welcomes their families. We're trans persons can fully live and decide about their dreams and lives. And we're going to conquer that by strategic campaigns, with messages, with empathy.
WP: Thank you, Ivan, for taking the time to speak with us. We look forward to seeing what Fundación is able to do in creating a safer and more equal space for LGBTI communities in Panama.
I: Thank you, it's been a pleasure.
WP: For more than 35 years, NDI has been honored to work with thousands of courageous and committed democratic activists around the world to help countries develop the institution's practices and skills necessary for democracy's success. For more information, please visit our website at www.ndi.org.
You've heard about how an organization is engaging with communities and collecting stories to plan for future advocacy efforts from Fundación Iguales. But what happens when you are in the middle of a project, when things get disrupted? LGBTI communities in Romania successfully organized to prevent an amendment to the constitution that would ban same sex marriage that was put to a referendum in 2018. In the aftermath of these efforts, there was a need to establish priorities moving forward and create space for dialogue within the community about the next steps for the overall movement. Mosaic organized different segments of the LGBTI community, including transgender communities, LGBTI, Roma, women, and older people to build consensus around an advocacy agenda moving forward.
In the midst of these community outreach efforts, COVID-19 happened. Vlad Viski, executive director of MosaiQ is with us. Vlad, thanks for joining us.
Vlad Viski: Thank you for having me.
WP: Can you tell us a little bit more about your project?
VV: Between 2015 and 2018, in Romania, there was a national campaign to change the constitution and ban gay marriages, initiatives which were supported by conservative groups and a large share of the political party. For three years, in Romania, society has been talking, probably for the first time in a very serious manner, about LGBTI rights, about the place for the LGBT community in society. This conservative effort ended with a failure at the polls for the referendum to change the constitution, only 20% of Romanians actually casting the vote for this issue when the minimum threshold of votation, of turnout, was 30%.
This was possible with quite a successful campaign coming not from not only from MosaiQ but from other LGBTI organizations in Romania throughout the country. We all kind of went on the boycott strategy, we're actually asking people to boycott the referendum because human rights cannot be subject to a popular vote.
Once the referendum in 2018 failed in Romania, there was a question in the community. What should we do next? How should our agenda look like for the next couple of years? We at Mosaic, we really tried to focus and we really thought the issue of intersectionality as being extremely important. This is how the idea of this project started, Engage and Empower was the name of the project. It focused on six groups within the LGBT community: transgender people, LBTQ women, elderly, people living with HIV, Roma LGBT people, and sex workers.
WP: Could you talk a little bit more about how the organization is trying to maintain momentum in this community building efforts, despite what's going on with the pandemic?
VV: We at MosaiQ, we had to reimagine some of the projects that we were involved in, so that included canceling events or postponing them or rescheduling for the fall. But the problem is also that we don't really know the timeline for this story or when it will end. We've had issues related to personal issues of people in the community. People living with HIV were not getting their treatment due to the fact that hospitals were closed except for the coronavirus. Then we've had issues related to sex workers not being able to work anymore. The issue of poverty has been quite an important issue. A lot of people have been laid off, a lot of people were not able to pay rent, a lot of people were either in unemployment benefits, and so on.
At the personal level for us and as an organization, all of a sudden we got a lot more messages from people asking for help. We've tried to help them on a case by case basis. We are not a social health kind of organization, but we've tried to fix as many problems as we were able to. Then throughout this, and actually talking about issue of intersectionality and the issue of the project and the way we work with the Roma LGBT community, what we've witnessed throughout this pandemic and the lockdowns, especially, was an increase in violence, against Roma people from the police. So together with colleagues from civil society, especially Roma groups, we had to monitor hate speech in the media, monitor cases of abuse and violence from the police, and also make statements and letters to official institution, to the president and the prime minister and so on. So for us, it was an issue of also solidarity with other groups affected by the pandemic.
WP: I believe that you've had to move some of your activities online, correct?
VV: That was another part, which we kind of tried to make the best out of the situation. We felt that there were a lot of young kids, for example, who, because schools were closed, they had to go back and live with their homophobic parents. A lot of organizations, LGBT organizations in Romania were not able to have the Zoom meetings with their volunteers because they were living with homophobic or transphobic parents so they could not reveal what they were doing or who they were talking to. So the issue of depression and psychological pressure that comes on people being locked down, people trying to survive throughout this pandemic, we decided to have a campaign online, which was called MosaiQ Quarantine, and that included parties online in order to support queer artists who were not able to earn any money because there were no gigs. We organized these online parties and we paid them and we supported their work.
Then we had the zoom talks with, or like talks online, with all of the organizations and groups in Romania, LGBT groups, to kind of better see the situation on the ground in different cities in Romania. That was for us extremely important because we felt like there was a need to have this dialogue within the community.
Then we had the all sorts of posts on social media and different kinds of events. We also talked with organizations from the region, from the US, from Moldova, from Russia, to kind of see what the feeling also over there.
So for us, it was quite an exercise to take advantage of the fact that using social media and using online tools, we were able to reach out to people who otherwise would not have been able to participate in our events, being so far away.
WP: It sounds like Mosaic has certainly stepped up to the challenges. Could you just briefly talk about what NDI support has meant to Mosaic?
VV: I think the project funded by NDI was extremely important, both for the community ... right now, we have an active Roma LGBT group. We have all of these, the issue of intersectionality being put on the agenda. We have the [inaudible 00:19:36] sports, which is a sports club run by women who is also trying to grow based also on the support that Mosaic has offered through NDI. We've had, at the Pride last season, the first Roma LGBT contingent putting the issue on the agenda. So for us, in many regards, this project kind of focused us more on this intersectional approach to activism and the need to include all voices within the community. The trust that they had in us was very important.
WP: I'm glad to hear that it's been a fruitful partnership, both for NDI and Mosaic. Vlad, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
VV: Oh, that's it.
WP: We'll be back after this short message.
To hear more from democracy heroes and why inclusion is critical to democracy, listen to our DemWorks podcast, available on iTunes and SoundCloud.
Before the break we heard from two partners using digital platforms to create and support communities. But how are groups sustaining their online networks and communities once created? Rainbow Rights trained paralegals in the Philippines on legal issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity and how to support LGBTI communities. Through Google Classroom, these paralegals formed an online network to help communities facing discrimination and violence. Eljay, welcome to our podcast. Could you tell us a little bit more about the paralegal support project?
Eljay: Yeah. One of the main components of our community paralegal program is to create a national online platform wherein all of the trained paralegals of our organization will be able to share their experiences, their cases, and they could also refer some of the difficult cases to us. So that's the main idea. It's just that it gained a deeper significance in this COVID-19 pandemic that we're experiencing because a lot of legal organizations hurried to do to do what we had been doing in the past year, which is to create an online platform.
Right now, even though there's a lot of problems in the Philippines barring the central autocracy, we have been maintaining the platform. People are still referring cases to us and we are working on those cases. Part of the deeper significance that it has is in the Philippines, human rights violations have increased because of the lockdown. So it became a source of reporting documentation for these human rights violations during the lockdown. We did not expect that it will evolve that way but we're happy that it has, and despite some connectivity issues in the Philippines, it has been reaping as well.
WP: So when you're talking about the program, there've been increased human rights reports, is that generally more broad human rights abuses? Or are we talking specifically to the LGBTI community?
E: Yeah, we accept every report on numerous violations, but we take on the LGBTI human rights violations specifically. When we receive human rights violations that is not really in our lane, so to speak, we refer them to bigger organizations. We have seen increased numerous violation against the LGBTQI community here.
WP: You had mentioned that Rainbow Rights fortunately had organized the training for the paralegals before the pandemic hit and already have a plan in place to use online platforms, which was Google Classroom, to create this network across the country. You've briefly referenced what the current situation is like now, but could you go a little deeper into that? What kind of challenges is Rainbow Rights facing in continuing to engage with the community?
E: As I have mentioned, maybe a bigger challenge is the connectivity issues in the Philippines. We don't have good internet here, and that's a challenge. It's also challenged to keep the interest level of our paralegals and keep them engaged. That is also challenged because they have bigger problems now. Because of the pandemic, they're thinking of their health, they're thinking of their livelihoods, and that is a challenge during these times.
However, before the pandemic, we also saw that we had to be creative at the level of interest, so that's a challenge. The situation, it's working. Overall situation's working. We have referrals, we continue to share modules in our platform, refreshing their memory on the training. We also try to be light. There are some light moments so that they be so that they keep themselves also, the interest level is high and that they see us and they trust us in maintaining this platform.
WP: You alluded to the fact that it's often difficult to maintain interest of your paralegals when engaging online.
E: Basically, we had a two-pronged approach on this. One is to find the people who has a genuine interest to serve the community. So in our selection process, we have chosen people who have track records of service in their communities. The other side of the approach is to build on the spirit of camaraderie, friendship, and community solidarity between us. So even before the pandemic, we have been setting up calls and checking on them, even adding them on Facebook and Twitter just to continually engage with them. I think that's a big part of our strategies. We're also looking to ... I think in my personal view, I think a lot of what they do is labor, so I think in the future, we will be able to compensate them for their efforts in their community and we're looking into that as well.
WP: That's really interesting. Could you speak a little bit more to the role and benefits of partnering with international organizations such as NDI in your work and as well as helping to sustain this national network?
E: Yeah. I think it's invaluable. Foreign support, foreign funding support such as the NDI had been really great for us. We have been envisioning this project for a long time and NDI gave us the opportunity to really implement it. They also gave us a level of freedom in how to execute the program because there's a recognition that we in the ground know how to solve our problems. But there's also a lot of technical support aside from the funding. Like in digital security, NDI has given us a lot of resources, even given us a training for this and how to secure our online platforms. They also provided a lot of coalition building resources. So there, and I think we are also sharing what our experience with NDI to our other funders, because I think with NDI, we had a lot of freedom and we had a lot of support because you guys always check on us, so that's great.
WP: Well, I'm glad to hear that NDI is taking care of our partners. Thinking about how June is Pride Month for a lot of communities around the world, and Pride is often equated to the community of LGBTI people around the world how would you say Rainbow Rights efforts have contributed to strengthening the community in the light of the violence and the discrimination that LGBTI people face on a daily basis in the Philippines?
E: Since 2005, Rainbow Rights has been doing this approach wherein we come ... a top down approach at the policy level, but we also complement it with from the grassroots, bottom up approach. We make sure that whatever we bring at the policy level, it is informed by our grassroots services. I think that's one of our biggest contribution, is to really complement policy with experience on the ground. Most of the policies that we've pushed for is really coming from what our experiences and what are the real needs of the people that we serve in the communities. I think that's one of our biggest contributions in our approach. We're not just the legal, we don't just bring cases to court. We don't just bring legal expertise, but we also inform it with community level approaches and grassroots approaches.
WP: Well, thank you LJ again for taking the time to speak with us and telling us a little bit more about how Rainbow Rights is contributing to a holistic support system to the LGBTI community in the Philippines.
E: Thank you so much for this opportunity.
WP: Thank you to Ivan, Vlad, and Eljay for sharing their experiences and for the work you're doing to advance LGBTI equality and inclusion, and thank you to our listeners. To learn more about NDI or to listen to other DemWorks podcasts, please visit us at ndi.org

Rainbow Rights Paralegal Training



A Conversation With LGBTI Activists on Community-Building

Democracy (General), Podcast Listen LGBTI Pride National Democratic Institute NDICountries: All Regions

Daniel Levine on Hidden Hands, Vocation and Sustainable Critique in International Relations











Daniel Levine is part of a new generation
of IR scholars that takes a more pluralist approach to addressing the hard and
important questions generated by international politics. While many of those
interviewed here display a fairly consistent commitment to a certain position
within what is often referred to as 'the debate' in IR, Levine straddles the boundaries
of a diverse range of positions and understandings. Time to ask for
elaboration.














Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is, according
to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your
position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?






The
question I'd like us to be asking more clearly than we are is, 'are we a
vocation and, if so, what kind of vocation are we'? This points to a varied set
of questions that we, as scholars, gesture to but spend relatively little
theoretical time developing or unpacking. There's an assumption that the
knowledge we produce is supposed to be put good for something, practical in
light of some praiseworthy purpose. Even theorists who perceive themselves to
be epistemologically value-free hope, I think, at least on an intuitive level, that
some practical good will emerge from what they do. They hope that they are doing
'good work' in the sense that some Christians use this term. But, there is not
really a sustained project of thinking through how those works work: how our notions of vocation might
be different or even mutually exclusive, and how the differences in our notions
of vocation might be bound up in non-obvious ways to our epistemological,
methodological, and theoretical choices.







Moreover,
except for a few very important and quite heroic (and minoritarian) efforts, we
don't really have a way to think systematically about the structure of the
profession: how it influences or intervenes or otherwise acts on particular
ideas as they percolate through it, and how those ideas get 'taken up' into
policy. Brian Schmidt has
done work like that, so has Inanna Hamati-Ataya,
Ole Waever, Ido Oren,
Oded Löwenheim, Elizabeth Dauphinee, Naeem Inayatullah,
and Piki Ish-Shalom; and it's good work, but
they are doing what they are doing with limited resources, and I think without due
appreciation from a big chunk of the field as to why that work is important and
what it means.







When
I started writing Recovering
International Relations, I had wanted to recover the 'view from nowhere'
that many social scientists idealize. You know, that methodological conceit
where we imagine we are standing on Mars, watching the earth through a
telescope, or we're Archimedes standing outside of the world, leveraging it
with distance and dispassion. I had worked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
for a long time, was living in Tel Aviv, working for a think tank, and was—am—an
Israeli citizen and an American citizen. I had this somewhat shocking discovery
right after the Second Intifada broke
out. Most of my senior colleagues were deploying their expertise in what seemed
to me to be a very tendentious way: to show why the second Intifada was Yassar
Arafat's fault or the Palestinian Authority's fault—or, in a few cases, the
Israelis' fault. There were some very simplistic political agendas that were
driving this research. People were watching the evening news, coming into work
the next morning, and then running Ehud Yaari's commentary through their respective fact-values-methods mill. Or if they were
well-connected, they were talking to their friends on the 'inside', and doing
the same thing.







It
was hard to admit this for a long time, but I was very naïve. I found that very
unsettling and quite disillusioning. That's why the view from nowhere was so
appealing. I wanted to be able to talk about
Israel and Palestine without taking a position on Israel and Palestine—but without eschewing the expertise I had
acquired along the way, in part because I was
a party to this conflict, and cared about its outcome. I was young,
inexperienced, and slightly arrogant to boot—neither yet a scholar, nor an 'expert,'
nor really aware of the game I was playing. So my objections were not well
received, nor did I pose them especially coherently. To their credit, my senior
colleagues did recognize something worthwhile in my diatribes, and they did
their best to help me get into graduate school.







As the
project developed, and as I started engaging with my mentors in grad school, it
appeared that the view from nowhere was essentially impossible to recover. With
Hegel and with the poststructuralists, we can't really think from nowhere; the
idea of it is this kind of intellectual optical illusion, as though thinking
simply happens, without a mind that is conditioned by being in the world. Therefore,
there needs to be a process by which we give account of ourselves.







There
are a variety of different ways to consider how one might do that. There's what
we might call the agentic approach, in which we think through the structure of
thought itself: its limitations, our dependence on a certain image of thinking
notwithstanding those limits—thought's work on us, on our minds. This is closest
to what I do, drawing on Adorno and Kant, and Adorno's account of how concepts
work in the mind; how they pull us away from the things we mean to understand
even as they give us the words to understand them. And drawing on Jane Bennett, William Connolly,
Hannah Arendt, Cornel West, JoanTronto, and JudithButler to think through how one
conditions oneself to accept those limitations from a space of love, humility
and service. Patrick Jackson's (TheoryTalk #44) Conduct of Research in IR is quite
similar to this approach; and so is Colin Wight's Agents, Structures and International
Relations; though they use more philosophy of science than I do.







One
could also do this more 'structurally.' One could say 'this is how the academy
works and this is how the academy interconnects with the larger political
community' and then try to trace out those links: I mentioned Hamati-Ataya,
Oren, and Ish-Shalom, or you could think of Isaac Kamola,
Helen Kinsella, or
Srdjan Vucetic.








Any of
those approaches—or really, some admixture of them—would be pieces of that
project. I would like us to be doing more of that—alongside, not instead of,
all the other things we are already doing, from historical institutionalism to formal
modeling, to large-N and quantitative approaches, and normative, feminist and
critical ones. I would like such self-accounting to be one of the things
scholars do, that they take it as seriously as they take methods, epistemology,
data, etc. Driving that claim home in our field, as it's presently constituted,
is our biggest challenge.






How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?






I'm 42,
so the Cold War was a big deal. I'm American-born, and I was raised in a pretty
typical suburb. John Stewart from the Daily
Show is probably the most famous product of my hometown, though I didn't
know him. My view of history was a liberal and progressive in the Michael
Waltzer/Ulrich Beck/Anthony Giddens, vein, but I was definitely influenced by
the global circumstances of the time, and by the 'End of History' discourse
that was in the air. I thought that the US was a force of good in the world. I
was a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey. I really wanted to live in Israel for
personal reasons, and the moral challenge of living in Israel after the
Intifada seemed to go away with the peace process. So, it seemed to me that it
was a kind of golden moment: you could 'render unto Caesar what was due to Caesar',
and do the same for the Lord. I could actually be a Jewish-Israeli national and
also a political progressive. (That phrase is, of course, drawn from the Gospels,
and that may give you some sense of how my stated religious affiliations might
have differed from the conceptual and theological structures upon which they actually
rested—score one for the necessity of reflexivity. But in any case, those
events were important.)







I moved
to Israel when I was 22 and was drafted into the military after I took
citizenship there. In the IDF, I was a low-level functionary/general laborer—a
'jobnik', someone who probably produces less in utility than they consume in
rations. Our job was to provide support for the combatants that patrolled a
certain chunk of the West Bank near Nablus—Shechem, as we called it, after the
biblical name. I was not a particularly distinguished soldier. But we were cogs
in a very large military occupation, and being inside a machine like that, you
can see how the gears and pieces of it meshed together, and I started taking
notice of this. Sometimes I'd help keep the diary in the operations room. You
saw how it all worked, or didn't work; or rather, for whom it worked and for
whom it didn't. All that was very sobering and quite fascinating.







I once
attended a lecture given by the African politics scholar Scott Straus, and he
said the thing about being present right after genocide is that you come across
these pits full of dead bodies. It's really shocking and horrific—there they
are, just as plain as day. Nothing I saw in the sheer level of violence compares
to that in any way—I should stress this. But that sense of it all just being out there, as plain as day, and being
shocked by this—that resonated with me. Everyone who cared to look could
understand how the occupation worked, or at least how chunks of it worked. So I
would say in terms of events, those things were the big pieces that structured
my thinking.







Here's two
anecdotal examples. Since I was a grade of soldier with very limited skills, I
was on guard duty a lot. We had a radio. I could hear the Prime Minister on the
radio saying we are going to strike so-and-so in response to an attack on such-and-such,
and then I could see helicopters pass overhead to Nablus, and then I could see
smoke. Then I could see soldiers come back from going out to do whatever it was
the helicopter had provided air support for. I'd see ambulances with red
crescents or red Stars of David rush down the main road. It began to occur to
me that there was a certain economy of violence in speech and performance. I
didn't think about it in specifically theoretical terms before I went back to
graduate school, but Israelis had been killed, political outrage had been
generated. There was a kind of affective deficit in Israeli politics that
demanded a response, and some amount of suffering had to be returned—so the
government could say it was doing its job. I found this very depressing. My odd
way of experiencing this—neither fully inside nor outside—is certainly not the
most important or authentic, and I'm not trying to set myself up as an expert
on this basis. I'm only trying to account for how it made me think at the time
and how that shows up in what and how I write now.







Later,
when I was in the reserves, I was in the same unit with the same guys every
year. One year, we were lacing our boots and getting our equipment for our
three weeks of duty in a sector of the West Bank near Hebron, I think it was. I
remember one guy, one of the more hawkish guys, said 'we'll show 'em this time,
we'll show them what's what'. Three weeks later, that same guy said 'Jeez, it's
like we're like a thorn in their backside; no wonder they hate us so much.' (He
actually used some colorful imagery that I can't share with you.) I remember
thinking, 'well, ok, he'll go home and he'll tell his family and his friends;
some good will come of this.' The next year, I saw the same guy saying the same
thing at the start, 'we'll show those SOBs.' And then three weeks later, 'oh my
God, this is so pointless, no wonder they hate us…' So after a few years of
this I finally said to him, 'tagid, ma
yihiyeh itcha?'—Like, dude, what's your deal? 'We've had this conversation every year! What happens to you in
the 48 weeks that you're not here that you forget this?' And I think he looked
at me like, 'what are you talking about?'







I
thought about that afterwards: we have these moments of experience when we're
out of our everyday environment and discourse, the diet of news and fear, PR
and political nonsense—that's when these insights become possible. So, when
this guy comes in and says 'ok, we'll get those SOBs,' he's carrying with him this
discourse that he has from home, from the news and TV, from his 'parliament'
with his friends where they get together and talk about politics and war and
economics and whatever else—and then a few weeks of occupation duty disrupts
all that, makes him see it in a different light, and he has these kinds of
fugitive experiences which give him a weirdly acute critical insight. Suddenly,
he's this mini-Foucault.







In a
few weeks, though, he goes back to his life, there's no space or niche into
which that uncomfortable, fugitive insight can really grow, so it just sort of
disappears or withers on the vine, its power is dissipated. This is a very
real, direct experience of violence and it's covered over by all of this
jibber-jabber. So there's a moment where you start to wonder: what exactly
happens there? What happens in those 48 weeks? What happens to me during those weeks? You can see how a
kind of ongoing critical self-interrogation would evolve out of that. Again,
none of those things are exactly what my book's about, but it gives you a sense
of how you might find Adorno's kind of critical relentlessness and negativity vital
and important and really useful and necessary. You can see how that might
inform my thinking.







In
terms of books, as an undergraduate, I had read, not very attentively, Said and
Foucault, and all of the stuff at the University of Chicago we had to take in
what they called the 'Scosh Sequence,' from sociologists like Elijah Anderson
and William Julius Wilson to Charles Lindblom and Mancur Olsen: texts from the
positive and the interpretive to the post-structural. I had courses with some
very smart Israeli and Palestinian profs—Ephraim Yaar, Salim Tamari, Ariela
Finkelstein. And of course Rashid Khalidi was there at that time. Once I was in
the military, the Foucault and Said suddenly started popping around in my head.
Suddenly, this sort of lived experience of being on guard duty made the
Panopticon and the notion of discipline go from being a rather complicated,
obscure concept to something concrete. 'Oh! That's
what discipline is!'







When I
went back to graduate school, I was given a pretty steady diet of Waltz,
rational deterrence theory, Barry Posen, Stephen Walt (Theory Talk #33), and Robert Jervis (Theory Talk #12). Shai
Feldman was a remarkable teacher, so were Ilai Alon in philosophy, Shlomo
Shoham in sociology and Aharon Shai in History. Additionally I had colleagues
at work who were PhD students at the Hebrew University working with Emanuel Adler;
they gave me Wendt (Theory Talk #3), Katzenstein's (TheoryTalk # 15) Culture of National Security, Adler and
Barnett, and Jutta Weldes' early article on 'Constructing National Interests'
in the EJIR (PDF here).
My job was to help them publish their monographs, so I got really into the guts
of their arguments, which were fascinating. I am not really an agency-centered
theory guy anymore and I am not really a constructivist anymore, but that stuff
was fantastic. I saw that one could write from a wholly different viewpoint,
perspective, and voice. This is all very mainstream in IR now, but at the time,
it felt quite edgy, very novel. Part of the reason why the middle chapters of Recovering IR has these long discussions
about different kinds of constructivism is that I wouldn't have had two
thoughts to rub together if it was not for those books. I do disagree with them
now and strongly, but they were very important to me all the same.






What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the
world in a global way?






I'd be
more comfortable answering that question as someone who was, until relatively
recently, a grad student. I've not been productive long enough to say 'Well,
here's how to succeed in this business and be a theorist of enduring substance
or importance' with any authority. But I can say, 'here's how I'm trying to be
one.' There's a famous article by Albert O. Hirschman called 'The Principle of
the Hiding Hand,' (PDF here)
and in it he says that frequently, the only way one can get through really
large or complicated projects is to delude oneself as to how hard the project
is actually going to be. He takes as an example these ambitious, massively
complicated post-colonial economic projects of the Aswan High Dam variety. The
only way such enormous projects ever get off the ground, he says, is if one
either denies their true complexity or deludes oneself. Otherwise you despair
and you never get it done. From the first day of seminar to dissertation
proposal to job—thank God I had no idea what I was in for, or I might have
quit.







Also,
the job market being what it was, we had to be very, very passionate scholars who
wrote and argued for the sheer intellectual rush and love of writing. And yet,
we also had to be very practical and almost cynical about the way in which the
academic market builds on the prestige of publications and the way in which
prestige becomes shorthand for your commodity value. At least in the US, the
decline of tenure and the emergence of a kind of new class of academics whose
realm of responsibility is specifically to engage in uncomfortable kinds of
political and moral critique—but without tenure, and at the mercy of a sometimes
feckless dean, an overburdened department chair or fickle colleagues—that's very scary. If you're doing 'normal
science', it's a different game and the challenges are different. But if your
job is to do critique, in the last ten years, it's a very big deal. Very
difficult. I'm very fortunate in that regard; at Alabama I've had great support
from my department, my chair, and my college.







I was a
Johns Hopkins PhD, and my department was fantastic in terms of giving me
support, encouragement, getting out of my way while throwing interesting books
at me, reading drafts that were bad and helping me make them good—or at least
telling me why they were bad. We did
not get particularly good professional training, because I think they did not
want us to get professionalized before we found our own voice. I'm really
grateful for that, truly. But then there's this period in which you have to
figure out how to make your voice into a commodity. That's really tough, it's a
little bit disheartening—even to discover that you must be a commodity is dismaying; didn't we go into the academy to avoid
this sort of logic? But just like Marx says, commodities have a double life, and
so do you. The use-value of your scholarship and its exchange-value do not
interlock automatically and without friction. So you spend all this time on the
use-value of it—writing a cool, smart, interesting dissertation—thinking that
will translate into exchange-value, and it turns out that it sort of does, but
a lot of other things translate into exchange-value too that aren't really about
how good your work is necessarily. And many of your colleagues, if what you're
doing is original, won't really understand what you're doing; the value or the
creativity of it won't be apparent to them unless they spend a lot of time sifting
through your bad drafts of it, which only a few—but God bless those—will do. So
how you create exchange-value for yourself is important. So is finding people
who will care about you, your project, your future—and learning when to take
their advice, when to ignore it, and how to do so tactfully.







If all that's
hard, you're probably doing it right. It's unfortunate that that's how it is,
but at all events, that's how it was for me.











Would you elaborate on the concept of
vocation and why this is so important to the view from nowhere? It is important
to say that the view from nowhere is perhaps difficult. So is vocation, or a
kind of Weberian approach, a way to articulate that for you?







There's
a quote in a book from a Brazilian novelist named Machado de Assis. His
protagonist is this fellow Bras Cubas, who's writing a posthumous memoir of his
own life. He's writing from beyond the grave. From there, he can view his whole
life and his entire society from outside; he's finally achieved positivism's
view from nowhere. But the thing about this view—and the book means to be a
sendup of the Comtean positivism that was fashionable in Brazil in those
days—is that it gives him no comfort. He now knows why he lived his life the
way he did; how he failed and what was—and what was not—his fault. The
absurdity of it all makes sense. But it changes nothing: he has died
unfulfilled, unloved, and essentially alone: a minor poet and back-bench politician
who was ultimately of little use to anyone nor of much to himself. All he knows
is how that happened.







In the
end, if we're all playing a role in how a world comes into being and it's in
some sense our job simply to accept this, and our job as scholars merely to
explain it, this gives us no comfort in the face of suffering, in the face of
violence and evil. To some extent as scholars, and to some extent as a
discipline, we exist as a response to evil, to suffering, to foolishness, to
folly; it's not a coincidence that the first professorship of IR is created in
Britain in the wake of WWI, and that it's given to someone like E. H. Carr.







If we
don't have a view from nowhere because we've given up anything like a moral
sense that can't be reduced to fractional, material, or ideological
sensibilities, and if we know that sometimes those 'views from somewhere' can
provide cover for terrible kinds of evil or justify awful kinds of suffering,
then the notion of vocation seems to come in at that point and say well,
'here's what I hope I'm doing', or 'here's what I wish to be doing', or 'here's
what I'd like to think I'm doing', and then allowing others to weigh in and
give their two cents. Vocation, in the sense of Weber's lectures, comes out of
that. It's Kant for social scientists: What can I know? What should I do? For
what may I hope? In other words, what the necessity and obligation of thinking
is on the one hand, and on the other what its limitations are.







This is
a way to save International Relations from two things: one, from relativism and
perspectivism, and the other, from a descent into the technocratic or the
managerial. I am trying to stand between the two. My own intellectual
background was in security studies at Tel Aviv University in the 1990s: the
period immediately after Maastricht, in the period of the Oslo Process, the end
of Apartheid. My hope back in the days when the peace process seemed to me to
be going well was that I'd be able to have a kind of technocratic job in
Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Defense. Counting tanks, or something
similar. I thought that would be a pretty good job. I would be doing my part to
maintain a society that had constructed a stable, long-term deterrent by which
to meaningfully address the problem of Jewish statelessness and vulnerability,
but without the disenfranchisement of another people. I could sit down and
count my tanks with a clear conscience, because the specter of evil was being
removed from that work. The problem of the occupation was being be solved.
Again, it's somewhat embarrassing to admit this now.







I would
say in the US academy, there is definitely a balance in favor of the
technocrats. We have enormous machines for the production and consumption of
PhDs in this country. The defense establishment is an enormous player. Groups
like the Institute for Defense Analysis need a lot of PhDs, the NSF funds a lot
of PhDs (for now, at least), and that tips the balance of the profession in a
certain way. My ability to use ideas compellingly at ISA won't change that fact
all by itself, there's a base-superstructure issue in play there.







In
Europe, it's a different story, for a bunch of reasons. The defense
establishments of the EU member states aren't as onerous a presence. And, there
are more of them; so there's a kind of diversity there and a need to think
culturally about how these various institutions interlock and how people learn
to talk to each other: the Martha Finnemore-to-Vincent Pouliot-to-Iver Neumann (Theory Talk #52) study of ideas and institutions and
officials. Plus, you have universities like the EUI and the CEU, which are not
reducible to any particular national interest or education system; creating
knowledge, but for a political/state form that's still emergent. No one knows
exactly what it is, what its institutions and interests will ultimately be.
Because of that, it's hard to imagine the EUI producing scholars with obviously
nationally-inflected research programs, like Halford Mackinder,
Mahan, Ratzel from a century
ago. There will still be reifications and ideologies, but there's more 'give'
since the institutions are still in play. And there's fantastically interesting
stuff happening in Australia, and in Singapore—think of people like Janice
Bialley-Mattern, Tony Burke and Roland Bleiker.











Critique has a long and controversial
history in our discipline. Could you perhaps elaborate, as a kind of background
or setting, how critique can be used in IR and why you've placed it at the
center of your approach to IR theory?







Critique
as term of art comes into the profession through Robert Cox (Theory Talk #37) and through the folks that were writing
after him in the '90s, including Neufeld, Booth, Wyn-Jones, Rengger, Linklater and
Ashley—though pieces of the reflexive practice of critique are present in the
field well before. For Cox, the famous line is that theory is always 'for
something and for someone.' The question is, if that's true how far down does
that problem go? Is it a problem of epistemology and method, or is it a problem
of being as such, a problem of ontology? Is it fundamental to the nature of
politics?







If the
set of processes to which we refer when we speak of 'thinking' is inherently
for someone and for something, and that problem harkens back to the idea that
all thinking is grounded in one's interests and perspectives, i.e., that all
practical or systematic attempts to understand politics are 'virtuous' in the
Machiavellian sense (they serve princely interests) but not necessarily in the Christian
sense (deriving from transcendent values), then we have a real problem in keeping
those two things separate in our minds. Think of Linklater's book Men and Citizens in International Relations
as a key node in that argument, though Linklater ultimately believes (at least
in that book) that a reconciliation between the two is possible. I'm less
convinced.







Now
recall the vocation point we discussed before. IR as a discipline has a deep
sense of moral calling which goes beyond princely interest. And the traditions
on which it draws are as much transcendently normative as anything else. So
encoded in our ostensibly practical-Machiavellian analyses is going to be
something like a sense of Christian virtue; we'll believe we're not merely
correct in our analyses, but really and
truly right in some otherworldly, transcendent way. True or not, that sense
of conviction will attach itself to our thinking, to the political forces and
agendas that we're serving. We'll come to believe that we are citing
Machiavelli in the service of something greater: whether that's 'scientific
truth' or the national interest, or what have you. Nothing could be more
dangerous than that. Critique, as an intervention, comes here: to dispel or
chasten those beliefs. Harry Gould, Brent Steele, and especially Ned Lebow (Theory Talk #53) write about prudence and a sense of
finitude: these are the close cousins of this kind of critique.







If we
take seriously the notion that people sometimes fight and kill in the service
of really awful causes while believing they are doing right, and that scholars
sometimes help them sustain those convictions rather than disabuse them of them—even
if they do not intend this—then critique becomes an awfully big problem and it
really threatens to undermine the profession as such. It opens up a whole new
level of obligation and responsibility, and it magnifies what might otherwise
be staid 'inside baseball'—Intramural scholarly or methodological debates. Part
of the reason why the 'great debates' were so great—so hotly fought—had to do
with this: our scholarly debates were, in fact, ideological ones.







It
undermines the field in another way as well. If we take critique seriously,
there's got to be a lot of moral reflection by scholars. That will make it hard
to produce scholarship quickly, to be an all-purpose intellectual that can
quickly produce thought-product in a policy-appropriate way, because I will
want to be thinking from another space, and of course precisely what
policy-makers want is that you don't
think from some other space; that you present them with 'shovel ready' policy
that solves problems without creating new ones.







So you
now have not just a kind of theoretical or methodological interruption in the
discussion of, say, absolute or relative gains. You now have to give an account
of yourself. And for me, that's what critique in IR means. To unpack the
definition I gave above, it's the attempt to give an account of what the duties
and limits of one's thinking are in the context of politics, given the nature
of politics as we understand it. Because IR comes out of the Second World War,
we're bound to take the most capacious notions of what political evil and
contingency can be; if we are not always in the midst of genocide and ruin,
then we are at least potentially so. And so contingency and complexity and all
the stuff that we're talking about must face that. I want to hold out that Carl
Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau might be
right—in ways which neither they, nor I, can completely fathom. Then I have
to give accounts of thinking that take a level of responsibility commensurate
with that possibility.







In that
vein, when I look at accounts of thinking in the context of the political, when
I look at what concepts are and how they work and how they do work on the world
so that it can be rendered tractable to thought, I realize that what we come up
with when we're done doesn't look very much like politics anymore. We have
tools which, when applied to politics, change it quite dramatically; they reify
or denature it. To be critical in the face of that, you're going to be obliged
to an extensive degree of self-interrogation and self-checking, which I call chastening.







That process
of chastening reason, is, in effect, what remains of the enlightenment obligation
to use practical reason to improve what Bacon called the human estate. What's
left of that obligation is to think in terms of the betterment of other human beings
as best as you can, knowing you can't do that very well, but that you may still
be obliged to try.







That's
really hard to do and it's an odd form of silence and non-silence. After all,
if I were to look at the Shoah while it was happening, or look at what happened
in Rwanda, and say 'well, I don't really have a foundational position on which
to stand so I can't analyze or condemn that'—that would not be a morally
acceptable position. Price and Reus-Smit (TheoryTalk #27) say this
in their 1998 article and they are absolutely right. But then there's the fact
that I don't quite know what to say beyond 'stop murdering people!' The world
is so easy to break with words, and so hard to put back together with them—assuming
anyone cares at all about anything we say. So I am obliged to respond to those
kinds of events when I see them, and I am also obliged to acknowledge that I
can't respond to them well, because my authority comes from the conceptual tools
I have, and they aren't really very good. Essentially, what I'm doing as
scholar of IR is the equivalent is using the heel of my shoe to hammer in a nail.
(That's a nice line, no? I wish it was mine, but it's Hannah Arendt.) It will
probably work, but it will take a while, and the nail won't go in so straight. To
chasten one's thinking is to remind oneself that the heel of one's shoe is not
yet a hammer; that all we're doing is muddling through—even when we do our work
with absolute seriousness and strict attention to detail, context and method—as
of course we should.











You discuss IR theory in terms of different
reifications. In which was does that also lead you to take a stand against a Weberian
understanding of IR?







I think
where I depart from Weber is that he has more faith than I do that, at some
point, disenchantment produces something better. There is faith or hope on
their part that the iron cage that we experience as a result of disenchantment
and as a result of the transformation from earlier forms of charismatic and
traditional authority to contemporary rational ones won't always be oppressive,
not forever. New forms and ways of being will emerge, in which those
disenchanted modes actually will fulfill their promise for a kind of
improvement in the human estate. If it's a long, complicated process—hence the
image of slow boring into hard wood—but faith is still justified, good things
can still happen.







For me,
the question is how would you manage a society that is liable to go insane or
to descend into moments of madness because of the side-effects or intervening
effects of disenchantment and modernization, while holding fast to the notion
that at some point, this is going to get better for most people? I'm a bit less
certain about that than I read Patrick and Weber being. I think that even if
they're right, it makes sense morally as scholars, not necessarily as citizens
or individuals or people, to dwell in the loss of those who fall along the way.








I find
myself thinking about the people who are gone a lot. My ex-wife teaches on
slavery, and I think a lot about this terrible thing she once told me. On slave
ships, when there was not enough food they would throw the people overboard
because ship masters got insurance money if their property went overboard, but
not if human beings succumbed on-ship. There's a scene depicting this in
Spielberg's film Amistad and it
haunts me. I find myself thinking about those people, dragged under with their
chains. I wonder what they looked like, what they had to say. I wonder what
they might have created or how their great-great grandchildren children would
have played with my child. I wonder if my best friend or true love was never
born because her or his ancestor died in this way. An enormous number of people
perished. I can't quite believe this, even if I know it's true.







Yoram
Kaniuk, the recently deceased Israeli novelist, wrote that the Israeli state was
built on the ground-up bones of the Jews who couldn't get there because it was
founded too late. I wonder about them too. And when I taught course modules on
Cambodia, I would find myself looking at the photographs made of the people in
Tuol Sleng before they were killed, the photo archives which the prison kept
for itself. There is a mother, daughter, father, brother, son, and I find
myself drawn into their eyes and faces. I don't want those people to disappear
into zeros or statistics. I want somehow to give them some of their dignity
back, and I want to dwell in the tragic nature my own feeling because it bears
remembering that I cannot ever really do that. If I remember that, I will have
some sense of what life's worth is, and I won't speak crassly about
interventions or bombings or wars—wherever I might come down on them. I would
say that it's almost a religious obligation to attend to the memory of those
people. My desire to abide with them makes me very, very suspicious of hope or
progress. I want this practice of a kind of mourning or grief to chasten such
hope.







There's
a problem with that position. Some will point out to me that this will turn
into its own kind of Manichean counter-movement, a kind of Nietzschean ressentiment. Or else that dwelling in
mourning has a self-congratulatory quality to it. And there are certainly
problems with this position at the level of popular or mass politics. We do see
a lot of ressentiment in our
politics. On the left, there's a lot of angry, self-aggrandizing moral
superiority. And you can think about someone like Sarah Palin in the US as a
kind of populist rejection of guilt and responsibility from the right.







But as social
scientists, we might have space to be the voice for that kind of grief, to take
it on and disseminate the ethics that follow from it; to give that grief a
voice. That kind of relentless self-chastening is what I'm all about. I think
it opens you up to new agendas and possibilities. I think it's a much deeper
way to be 'policy relevant' than most of my colleagues understand this term. If
we are relentlessly self-critical as scholars, and if we relentlessly resist
the appropriation of scholarly narratives to simplistic moral or political ends
and if we, as a society, help to build an intolerance of that and a sense of
the mourning that comes out of that, we also open our society up to say things
like, 'ok, well what's left?'







And
then, well, maybe a lot of things are left, and some of them are not so bad. Maybe
we start to imagine something better. That's where I'd rejoin Jackson and
Weber; after that set of ethical/emotional/spiritual moves. I think, by the
way, that Patrick mostly agrees with me; it's only a question of what his work
emphasizes and what mine has emphasized. On this point, consider Ned Lebow's
notion of tragedy. He and I disagree on some of the details of that notion. But
on top of his remarkable erudition, he's a survivor of the Shoah. I suspect he has thought very deeply about grief and
mourning, and in ways that might not be open to me.











The final question I want to pose to you is
a substantive one: Your understanding of critique somehow does relate to
sustaining progress, in a way. Perhaps on the one hand, you are not so
optimistic as Weber was, but on the other hand, your work conveys the sense
that it is possible to bridge the gap between concepts and things. I'm not sure
if it's possible, but perhaps you can relate it to the substantive example of
how your work relates to concrete political situations. I think the example of
Israel-Palestine comes to mind best.







Again,
I don't think I am as optimistic as that. In my heart of hearts, I desperately
wish this to be the case. To think of the people who were most influential on
my intellectual development—my cohort of fellow grad students at Johns Hopkins
and our teachers, to whom as a group I owe, really, everything in intellectual
terms—I was certainly in the minority view. Most of them were, I think, working
in the Deleuzian vein of making 'theory worthy of the event.' I just don't
believe that's possible; or anyway I think it's really, really, really hard, the work of a generation to tell that
story well and have it percolate out into our discipline and our culture. In
the meantime, we must muddle through. I hope I'm wrong and I hope they're
right. I'm rooting for them, even as I try to give them a hard time—just as I
give Keohane (Theory Talk #9)
and Waltz and Wendt and everyone else I write about a hard time. But I'd be happy, very happy, to
be wrong.







What I
do think can be done is that you can sustain an awareness of the space between
things-in-themselves and concepts, and by extension some sense of the fragility
and the tenuousness of the things that you think and their links to the things
that you do. Out of this emerges a kind of chastened political praxis.







You mentioned
Israel and Palestine, which I care a great deal about and am trying to address
more squarely in the work I'm doing now, partly on my own and partly in pieces I've
worked on with my colleague Daniel Monk. What we observe is that though the diplomatic
negotiations failed pretty badly twelve and a half years ago, we're still
looking at the same people running the show: the same principal advisers and
discussants and interlocutors: in the US and Israel and in the Palestinian Authority.
The same concepts and assumptions too. Just a few days ago, Dennis Ross
published a long op-ed about how we get the peace process back on track, and
you might think that you're reading something from another time—as though the
conflict were a technical challenge rather than a political one. You know that
Prince song about 'partying like it's 1999'?







I don't
know what a peaceful, enriching, meaningful Israeli-Jewish-Arab-Palestinian-Muslim-Christian
collective co-existence or sharing of space or world looks like, but I know
that this pseudo-politics ain't that. When I see something that's just a
re-hashing, I can say, 'come on guys, that is not thinking, that's recycling
the old stuff and swapping out dates, proper nouns and a few of the verbs.' Nor
is it listening to other voices who might inspire us in different ways, or
might help us rethink our interests, categories and beliefs. Lately, I've been
listening to a band called System Ali, hip-hop guys from Jaffa's Ajami quarter,
who sing in four languages. What they say matters less to me than the fact that
they really seem to like another, they trust each other, they let each voice
sing its song and use its words. They have something to teach me about
listening, thinking, acting and feeling—because it's music after all—and that
can produce its own political openings.







Of course,
there are pressure groups, from industry and AIPAC to
whatever else in the US, and those groups merit discussion and debate, but I'm
also wary of the counter-assumption which follows from folks who talk about
this too reductively: that there actually is an American interest, or a
European or Arab or Israeli one, which somehow transcends partisan interest—one
that can be recovered once the diaspora Jews, the oil moguls, the arms dealers
or the Christian 'Left Behind' people are taken out of the picture. That feels
like the same heady brew that Treitschke and Meinecke and the German realpolitik scholars poured and drank:
that the national state has some transcendent purpose to which we gain access
by rising above or tuning out the voices of the polity or its chattering
classes. Only with a light liberal-internationalist gloss: Meinecke meets David
Lake (Theory Talk # 46),
Anne-Marie Slaughter or John Ikenberry.







I can
also go meet starry-eyed idealists who want to hold hands and sing John Lennon,
I can say to them yes, I want to hold your hand and sing John Lennon, but I am
also enough of a social scientist to know that if a policy does not respond to
real and pressing problems—water, land, borders etc.—that any approach that
does not respond to those things will be hopelessly idealist. It will be what
my granny called luftmentsch-nachess—the
silly imaginings of men with their heads in the clouds, like the parable about Thales
and the Thracian maiden. I am not interested in being either a luftmentsch nor a technocrat. So what
does that leave with you with? You need to balance.







You can
look at groups at the margins of political culture to see what they can tell
you. In Israel and Palestine, it's groups like Ta'ayush, Breaking the Silence and Zochrot, and this settler
leader who recently died, Rabbi Frohman, who was going out and meeting every
Palestinian leader he could because for him, being a Jew in the land was not,
in the first instance about his Israeli passport. There were and are
possibilities for discussion that feel really pregnant and feel very different
from the conversation we are sustaining now; which reveal its shallowness and
its limitations and its pretentiousness. These other voices are of course not
ideal either, they are going to have their own problems and limitations, their
own descent into power and exclusion and so on, but they reveal some of the lie
of what we're doing now.







I guess
in the end, social scientists make a living imagining the future on the basis
of the past. I also spend a lot of time reading novels and watching books and
films. Partly because I am lazy and I like them. Partly because I'm looking for
those novels and films to help me imagine other possibilities of being that
aren't drawn from the past. Art, Dewey tells us in The Public and its Problems,
is the real bearer of newness. Maybe then, I get to grab onto those things and
say ok, what if we made those them responsive to an expansive materialist
analysis of what an Israeli-Palestinian peace would need to survive? What if we
held the luftmentsch's feet to the
materialist/pragmatic fire, even as we held the wonk's feet to the luftmentsch's fire? Let them both squeal
for a while. There's possibility there.







Daniel J. Levine is assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Among his recent publications (see below) stands out his book Recovering International Relations.



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Related links








Faculty Profile at U-Alabama
Read the first chapter of Levine's Recovering IR (2012) here (pdf)
Read Barder and Levine's The World is Too Much (Millennium, 2012) here (pdf)
Read Levine's Why Morgenthau was not a Critical Theorist (International Relations, 2013) here (pdf)
Read Monk and Levine's The Resounding Silence here (pdf)




Print version of this Talk (pdf)