With the intensification of datafication/digitization of governance comes a growing relevance of predictive governance instruments. Such instruments operate through ongoing, fine-grained data analysis in order to anticipate future scenarios and to support proactive governmental decision-making.
At the professorship, we research predictive governance mainly in the context of the following projects and activities:
1. Research Project „The productive effects of predictive governance in education: Early Warning Indicator Systems (EWIS) in den US“
The project is embedded in the Heisenberg funding scheme of the professorship and focuses on early warning systems used in a growing number of US schools in order to identify students who are at risk for low performance, problematic behavior or drop-out. In the context of the project, we particularly research the following questions:
- How do early warning systems transform the temporality, that is, the temporal framing and rhythms of schooling? Which effects do these transformations evoke?
- How do teachers and school leaders embed early warning systems within their (professional) practices; how do they relate the early warning data to their own (professional) judgement?
- In how far does the “flagging” of students (of being at risk) affect the talking about/interacting with these students? How do the systems change the social relations of schools? How does it affect social inequality?
The project includes collaboration with Dr. Steven Lewis from Australian Catholic University as well as Prof. Mathias Decuypere from KU Leuven.
2. 21st century futures – Studies on the cultural reflection of the present
How do future-making practices – sets of activities containing conceptualizations (social imaginaries), institutionalizations (anticipatory governance), and operationalizations (e.g., predictive analytics) of future-oriented sense-making processes – constitute future-oriented knowledge orders in 21st century Western societies (and vice versa)? Dr. Manuel Reinhard’s postdoctoral research project (habilitation project) consists of three ethnographic case studies in public institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany on future-making practices in the context of contemporary financial, climate, and security policy. The prior analytical focus of the case studies lies on the knowledge-constitutive significance of:
- social imaginaries (eg., financial stability, sustainability, security),
- anticipatory governance (eg., the Financial Stability Committee, Interministerial Working Group on the Adaptation to Climate Change, Federal Security Council), and
- predictive analytics (e.g., economic forecasting, climate projections, military scenarios).
3. Workshop Series PreGov
Since September 2020, we organize annual workshops on Predictive Governance at HSU Hamburg. The workshops bring together researchers from Europe and beyond, as well as from different disciplinary backgrounds, to discuss ongoing projects and ideas. The workshop series includes collaboration with the professorship on controlling at HSU-Hamburg.
For more information on the workshop series see here.
The next workshop is scheduled for 15th and 16th September, 2022, and will particularly focus on methodological questions around researching predictive governance. More information on the program and registration for the workshop is available in the following program-document.
Letzte Änderung: 15. August 2022