The participants will discuss Fabian Besche-Truthe's, Tobias Böger's and Johanna Fischer's draft paper "Sequence analysis of social policy adoptions".

The event is part of the programme of the Political Economy Workshop.
PEW discusses early/unpublished papers or research plans that investigate the political economy (broadly construed) of social policy and inequality.

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The participants will discuss Helen Seitzer's and Tobias Böger's draft paper "Pathways towards caring countries. Mapping the diffusion of early childhood education and care entitlements".

The event is part of the programme of the Political Economy Workshop.
PEW discusses early/unpublished papers or research plans that investigate the political economy (broadly construed) of social policy and inequality.

Sign up here for the mailing list.

Von PISA werden die allermeisten schon einmal im Zusammenhang mit Schule gehört haben. Die dahinterstehende internationale Organisation, die OECD, wird vermutlich weitaus weniger Menschen ein Begriff sein. Dennoch hat diese Organisation maßgeblich weltweite Reformtrends in der Bildungspolitik geprägt. Gerade wenn man sich die teilweise umfassenden Bildungsreformen in manchen Ländern vor Augen führt, wird deutlich, dass bildungspolitische Entwicklungen zunehmend im globalen Kontext gesehen werden müssen. Kurz gesagt: Globalisierung ist nicht nur wirtschaftliche Vernetzung, sondern erfasst auch zunehmend Bereiche, die traditionell als Kernaufgabe von Nationalstaaten gesehen werden.
In unserem Vortrag möchten wir nachzeichnen, wie und warum sich im Laufe der letzten Jahrzehnte politische Entscheidungen in nahezu allen Bildungsbereichen auf die internationale Ebene verlagert haben. Dabei schauen wir uns zunächst an, warum Staaten diese Prozesse gebilligt und sogar selbst angestoßen haben. Danach beleuchten und hinterfragen wir die Rolle internationaler Organisationen, denn letztendlich wird durch die beschriebenen Internationalisierungsprozesse ein bestimmtes Bildungsmodell (zumindest implizit) transportiert. Ferner thematisieren wir die konkreten Auswirkungen in Deutschland und anderen Ländern und Regionen, die eine ‚entgrenzte‘ Bildungspolitik mit sich bringt. Hier interessiert uns unter anderem, welchen Einfluss eine internationale Bildungspolitik auf Lernende, auf Lehrende, und auf politische EntscheidungsträgerInnen haben kann.

The working group invites projects from both tiers A and B which deal with and collect information on in-kind benefits. The intention of the meeting is to get an overview what different projects are doing and to find a common vocabulary 

The meeting will be held in a hybrid format - for the zoom meeting room follow this link:

https://uni-bremen.zoom.us/j/93240464934?pwd=eTVjOW0vdld4NWdCNm9Zc0p4VlNuUT09

Meeting-ID: 932 4046 4934 – Kenncode: 147089

The world-wide gender gap in education depends not just on countries' economic performance, but also on cultural factors. However, world cultures are not fixed entities. Rather, culture is a characteristic of groups as well as of (world-)regions. How do global cultures moderate women's low education? Based on data of the World Value Survey, this study applies Latent Profile Analysis to generate a fuzzy-set typology of cultures in the world, but based on individuals instead of nation states. Individuals do not belong exclusively to one culture, but to several cultures simultaneously, with varying probabilities. In the second step, cross-classified logistic multilevel models test the country-time specific effects of 'female' on the risk of getting (at best) low education, controlling for various individual and country-specific factors. Cross-level interactions show that the 'female' effect on low education is indeed moderated by world cultures, but neither world cultures, economic factors nor individual characteristics completely explain the strength of the female effects.

Link to Zoom meeting

The datailed workshop schedule will be updated in due time.

Helen Seitzer will be defending her dissertation "Conceptualizing the Transnational Education Policymaking Process from a Relational Perspective".

If you would like to join the the defennse colloquium via Zoom, please wrtie an email to Helen Seitzer.

Fabian Besche-Truthe will defend his dissetation "Global Transformation of Education Systems. Investigating Domestic, Relational, and Transnational Levels of Policy Drivers".

If you would like to join the the defennse colloquium via Zoom, please wrtie an email to Fabian Besche-Truthe.

BIGSSS Doctoral Colloquium

This event is part of the Political Economy Workshop series organized by Bastian Becker and Hanna Lierse. Please subscribe to our email newsletter, and get in touch if you would like to receive this week's reading or present your own work at a future workshop.

The internal workshop on the diffusion of Global Social Policy will mark the first stage of a collaboration of all projects in the A pillar of the CRC 1342. We will use a network approach to understand the effect of exposure to previous adopters on the diffusion of welfare policies across the globe and each project will participate with their own set of indicators. The goal is to create a comprehensive, unified comparison between policy fields.

The workshop will take place as a video conference and is open for everyone. The workshop language is English.

In the week from 17 to 22 February 2020, the teaching and research institutes of the University of Bremen and Jacobs University invite you to the first Bremen Social Sciences Week! A variety of events on the topic of "Societies in Transition" will highlight current Bremen research priorities from various perspectives.

The programme is aimed at pupils, teachers, students and the general public. All events are free of charge. Listen, watch, learn, participate and discuss at the University of Bremen, in the Haus der Wissenschaft, on the Internet, in Bremen's pubs and in CITY 46. As diverse as research and teaching in Bremen are, so are the topics that await you during the course of the week: from PISA, social movements, NGOs and their means of political influence, filter bubbles, surrogate motherhood and student housing to questions of social cohesion and the digitalization of the social sciences, you will find everything you could wish for.

9.00 – 10.45: Meeting of members and guests

• General information about the CRC
• State of the art: 3 books in the process (Schmitt, Leisering, Martens)
• Possible next book "A very short history of social policy" (Obinger, Nullmeier and González de Reufels)
• how to attract books from contributors outside the CRC
• Cover for the series
• Foreword (First draft by González de Reufels)
• Division of work and operational processes (Team and Palgrave)

10.45 – 11.00: Coffee break

11.00 – 12.00: Open Access
Benjamin Ahlborn (State- and University Library Bremen)

12:00: Slots for individual book projects

• 12:20 - 12:40: B08, Ewa Kaminska
• 12.20 – 12.40: BIGSSS (B09 affiliated), Anna Wolkenhauer

12.45 – 14.00: Lunch Atlantik Campus Restaurant

14:20: Individual book projects

• 14.20-14.40: A03, Ulrich Mückenberger, Irene Dingeldey
• 14.40-15.00: A05, Kerstin Martens, Fabian Besche
• 15.00-15.20: B06, Gulnaz Isabekova
• 15.20-15.40: A02, Nate Breznau
• 15:50-16:10: B05, Armin Müller
• 16:10-16:30: ERC, Lorraine Frisina (on behalf of Amanda Shriwise)
• 16.30-16.50: BIGSSS, Silvana Lakeman

The workshop will be given by Prof. John W. Meyer, who currently is Hans-Koschnick-Professor at SOCIUM and the CRC 1342.

Prof. Meyer will introduce the topic in a key note. After a coffee break we will then have the opportunity to discuss 4 doctoral dissertation projects in which New Institutionalism as a theoretical approach may be important. 

Participation is open to everybody.

Higher education expanded rapidly worldwide after World War II. At the beginning of the period, there were many doubts about its contribution to development. These negative assessments receded over time, and changed to positive ones with neoliberal global hegemony: Education was central to the model, and expanded very rapidly. In particular, many social effects of higher education were reconceptualized as economically valuable "service sector" activities. Recent global attacks on neoliberalism – and on its higher educational component – may alter these trends, weakening and redirecting educational foci.

International Organizations (IOs) are vibrant actors in global social governance. They provide forums for exchange, contention and cooperation; they prepare, guide and supervise interna-tional treaties; they direct, finance, and implement projects, and exercise many more duties. The study of IOs in general has tremendously improved and advanced in recent decades. However, our knowledge about the involvement, influence and impact of IOs varies signifi-cantly by policy fields. While scholarship on IOs focuses often on issues areas like security, economics or environmental policies, we know comparatively little about IOs in issues areas related to social policies.

This workshop seeks to fill this gap in IO social governance. Papers prepared for this workshop have two purposes. On the one hand, they will shed light on IO involvement in a particular social policy field by describing the community of engaging IOs. They explore how a particular social policy field is constituted and which major or dominant IOs are setting the trends. On the other hand, the contributions will examine the leitmotifs these IOs promote in "their" field by exploring and analyzing the discourse they produce. By exploring the population of IOs setting and spreading ideas, the papers will provide novel knowledge about the architecture of arguments in global social governance.

The discussions will be guided by the following questions:

• What IOs are active in different social policy fields? How are the social policy fields constituted by specific types and constellations of IOs?
• What ideas are these IOs promoting? How can IO discourses over specific social policy issues be characterized? How has IO discourse developed over time? What were watersheds in the discursive framing of social policy ideas?
• Who are the addressees of IO discourses/activities? What kind of impact does the IO discourse/activity have on these addresses? (vertical perspective)
• How (and why) do IOs cooperate with other IOs/NGOs/commercial enterprises in so-cial policy fields? (horizontal perspective)

Generalising on the different fields presented, we hope to be able to present findings on a more encompassing definition of the "architecture of arguments" in global social governance, and the patterns of discourse characterizing global social policies.

Day 1 – May 24

12:00-13:00 Lunch in the University Mensa (optional)

13:00 Introduction
Alexandra Kaasch (University of Bielefeld), Kerstin Martens and Dennis Niemann (University of Bremen)

13:15-14:30 – Slot 1
Chair: Michael Windzio (University of Bremen)
Family Policy as Object of Global Social Governance
Rianne Mahon (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Disabilities as a "New" Global Social Theme
Nina Kolleck & Johannes Schuster (Freie Universität Berlin)
Discussant: Sigrid Hartong (Helmut Schmidt University)
Followed by plenary discussion

14:30-15:00 Coffee Break

15:00-16:15 – Slot 2
Chair: Keonhi Son (University of Bremen)
Global Discourses, Regional Framings and Individual Showcasing: Analyzing the World of Education IOs
Dennis Niemann, Kerstin Martens (University of Bremen)
Children's Rights
Anna Holzscheiter (TU Dresden)
Discussant: Rianne Mahon (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Followed by plenary discussion

16:15-16:45 Coffee Break

16:45-18:00 – Slot 3
Chair: Fabian Besche (University of Bremen)
International Organisations’ Involvement in Youth (Un)Employment as a Global Policy Field
Ross Fergusson (The Open University)
The Global Social Governance of Pensions
Martin Heneghan (University of Sheffield)
Discussant: Armando Barrientos (University of Manchester)
Followed by plenary discussion

18:00-18:30 Wrap-up day 1

20:00 Dinner (Ratskeller Bremen)

Day 2 – May 25

9:00-10:15 – Slot 4
Chair: David Krogman (University of Bremen)
IOs, Care and Migration: The Case of Migrant Health Care Workers
Nicola Yeates (The Open University)
Global Social Health Governance & Climate Change as a Global Social Challenge
Alexandra Kaasch (University of Bielefeld)
Discussant: Lorraine Frisina (University of Bremen, CRC 1342)
Followed by plenary discussion

10:15-10:45 Coffee Break

10:45-12:00 – Slot 5
Chair: Helen Seitzer (University of Bremen)
Global Labour Standards
Friederike Römer (University of Bremen)
Inequality and (Inclusive) Growth
Chris Deeming (University of Strathclyde)
Discussant: Heiko Pleines (University of Bremen, CRC 1342)
Followed by plenary discussion

12:00-13:00 Buffet Lunch (in-house)

13:00-14:15 – Slot 6
Chair: Friederike Römer (University of Bremen)
State, Rule, and System: International Organizations and Global Water Politics
Jeremy Schmidt (Durham University)
IO Agency in Regime Complexes [Food Security]
Matias E. Margulis (University of Edinburgh)
Discussant: Chris Deeming (University of Strathclyde)
Followed by plenary discussion

14:30-15:00 Wrap-up day 2
and future plans

Malaysia has been generally considered to be a moderate Muslim country. There are however recent instances towards radicalism and predispositions towards liberalism remain ambivalent. There are however think tanks in Malaysia that are sufficiently open in their thinking to assist with the liberal education agenda. These contradictory developments are indications that it is high time to pursue an agenda of genuine liberal education for the holistic development of not just the intellect but the very soul of Malaysian society.

Sanen Marshall argues that - general Malaysian conservatism apart - the education agenda loosely known as the "Islamisation of Knowledge" is actually noticeable in Malaysian school history textbooks and even in some of the ideas being promoted at the university level. The lack of an attempt at an alternative history in school text books is perhaps something that people should be concerned about in Malaysia. Sanen Marshall also considers the idea of "Islamic science" as an enlightened but sometimes misguided approach to Islamising knowledge.