European Union

The western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia – the country’s largest, home to chancellor hopeful Armin Laschet – has decided to reintroduce curbs on gatherings in a bid to curb an uptick in COVID-19 cases. North Rhine-Westphalia’s seven-day incidence rate...

Vienna has objected to Turkey’s formal request in May to participate in one of the EU’s flagship defence and security policies, known as the Permanent Structured Cooperation Framework (PESCO), pointing to the country’s deteriorating democratic values and relations with the...

Tunisian President Kais Saied sacked the defence minister Monday (26 July), a day after ousting the prime minister and suspending parliament, plunging the young democracy into constitutional crisis in the midst of a pandemic.

Comedians, businessmen and other outsiders – think of Edward Snowden, Slawi Trifonow (the TV star who won the Bulgarian elections recently), or Donald Trump – try to disrupt power, pretending to expose political elites. Why is this happening?

New research into vaccine misinformation on Facebook shows that the platform’s content recommendation algorithm can lead users towards, rather than away from, harmful conspiratorial material. 

The European Union on Monday (26 July) urged Lebanon's political elite to form a government without delay, following the nomination of Lebanese businessman Najib Mikati to be designated as prime minister.

Hundreds of documented cases of pushbacks of migrants and asylum seekers tell the story of a European Union whose member states seem to resort to increasingly degrading and inhuman practices in the management of its external borders.

Thousands of hectares have been destroyed due to forest fires since last Saturday in Spain, prompting a "critical situation" in Catalonia, where people have been evacuated as the blazes advance. EURACTIV’s partner EFE reported on Monday 

Alphabet unit Google has two months to improve the way it presents internet search results for flights and hotels and explain how it ranks these or face possible sanctions, the European Commission and EU consumer authorities said.

Russian authorities blocked access to jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's website on Monday (26 July) in the run-up to a parliamentary election, their latest attempt to sideline his allies cast by the Kremlin as US-backed trouble-makers.

Wildfires burned in regions across southern Europe on Monday (26 July), fuelled by hot weather and strong winds, as some northern countries cleaned up after a weekend of torrential rain and flooding.

EU finance ministers approved on Monday (26 July) the recovery plans of Croatia, Cyprus, Lithuania and Slovenia, bringing the total number of approvals to 16 out of the 27 member states.

Virtual workshop participants

Alina Felder

Convening virtually over the course of three days (30 June – 2 July 2021), twelve PhD students from six countries exchanged about current research and challenges to researching the area of higher education. The workshop on ‘European higher education in times of uncertainty’ comprised two keynote lectures by senior researchers – Jeroen Huisman and Martina Vukasovic – who shared their invaluable knowledge of working with and on higher education on the first respectively third day of the workshop. Jeroen Huisman (Professor for Higher Education at the Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent (CHEGG)) provided us with in-depth answers to several questions centring around the choice for approaching higher education theoretically and methodologically. Martina Vukasovic (Associate Professor at the Department of Administration and Organisation Theory, University of Bergen) delivered more questions than answers concerning the definition of Europe, European cooperation in the area of higher education and its measurement.

 

At the core of the workshop each participating PhD did not only share insights from her PhD project, but also provided feedback to one of her peers throughout four thematic panels. Presentations ranged from fully-fledged papers to dissertation monograph chapters and illustrated the great variety of conceptual, theoretical and methodological frameworks higher education researchers have at their disposal. The central issues during the first panel were the role of Universities of Applied Sciences in EU-funded research projects, the correlation between university attendance and pro-European attitudes and the Covid-19 pandemic as a permacrisis. During the second panel the central theme and traditional challenge for higher education institutions was internationalisation, which the doctoral researchers tackle in research projects concerned with cross-border cooperation and transnational alliances among higher education institutions and the European Universities Initiative. The third panel closely connected to the most current and pressing challenges to higher education institutions – digitalisation and the Covid-19 pandemic. In their presentations PhD scholars focused on Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), mobility policies in Brexit and Covid-19 contexts and on Covid-19 effects on Georgian higher education. The final panel was concerned with teacher and doctoral education in Germany, which the presenting doctoral researchers explore in projects on the transnational habitus of teaching students, support for PhD students and their employment sector choices.

 

The workshop underlined how exchanging with peers from all over Europe who are concerned with similar issues in their research does not only bear indispensable value for each individual researcher, but also for the growing community of higher education researchers. While I did present my own doctoral research during the workshop, I learned even more through co-organising the workshop with Anna Prisca Lohse from the Hertie School of Governance and through providing feedback to one of the fellow members of my international cohort of doctoral researchers. The three central things I took away from my different roles as workshop organiser, panel chair, discussant and presenter are:

• The courage to reach out for peers in my research area.
• A lot of enthusiasm to engage with my own research.
• Curiosity to dive into research areas that are not necessarily related to my own.

 

Ultimately, research workshops are venues where debates and future collaborations are initiated and long-lasting relationships among like-minded scholars nurtured and forged. The fact that we are conducting our doctoral research in times of uncertainty, brings unique contributions to all the research areas that are concerned with issues of higher education – be it educational, organisational or political science.

 

The post About time to research higher education! – A workshop-based reflection on European higher education research(ers) in times of uncertainty appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The EU’s recovery fund and new strategy on sustainable finance will expand the role small firms can play in building back the European economy in a sustainable manner, EU officials said.

WORKING DOCUMENT on Budget Amendments
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Urmas Paet

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

The EU's forthcoming regulation on Artificial Intelligence could cost the bloc's economy up to €31 billion over the next 5 years and cause investments to shrink by as much as 20%, according to a study published on Monday (26 July).

Cyprus is an excellent destination for holidays, but it is also a geopolitical volcano. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who doesn’t miss an opportunity to annoy the EU and infuriate Greece, is very active during this holiday season. Among other...

Europe's new climate legislation must focus on renovating its inefficient buildings and lifting millions of people out of energy poverty, but that is only possible if the EU works together with local governments, writes Emil Boc.

Croatia's plan to put famous inventor Nikola Tesla on its euro coins has sparked criticism in Serbia, whose central bank said Monday (26 July) it would take the issue to the EU.

Up to 9 in 10 hate crimes and attacks in the EU still go unreported because victims face difficulty reporting them, do not trust the police and believe that nothing would change if they report it, according to a new study by the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency.