Anna Durnova, Ph.D.
durnova@ihs.ac.at
Senior Researcher
Institut für Höhere Studien - Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS)
About Me:
I research the sociopolitical interplays of emotions and knowledge in politics and use examples from health and science controversies. The main interest of this work is to understand how emotions evaluate the range of actors and make them entitled to pronounce public concerns and how they sustain in that way legitimacy in politics. Empirical cases I work(ed) on: regulations on home birth, development of hygienic measurues, the role of science in post-truth era, usage of health reated data, and women's health, citizen protests in planning controversies.
Research Interests
Gender and Politics
Public Policy
Health Politics and Policy
Emotions In Deliberation
Emotions And Politics
Post-truth
Childbirth
Hygiene
Controversies
Countries of Interest
Austria
Czech Republic
France
Publications:
Journal Articles:
The article uses the postcommunist context to rethink the argumentative arena of current participatory governance. While citizen empowerment is a crucial component of participatory governance, it has not received much attention in either the policy or the research of the CEE region. Comparing two Czech prominent public controversies, the analysis reveals a mediating rejection of citizen empowerment because it is seen as being fundamentally opposed to modernization. Modernization is a powerful narrative justifying the postcommunist transformation as a supreme policy goal, being used as an argument for the technocratic style of governing. The analysis thus suggests that attention to cultural contingency of participatory governance is needed, and it proposes analysis of the cultural agency of policy discourses.
Discussing Foucault’s and Deleuze’s work on meaning-making, the article argues that we might make better use of the intersubjectivity of a meaning when interpreting emotions. Interpreting emotions in texts remains complicated because discussion on the ontological character of emotions sustains an opposition of emotion to meaning structures. Both Foucault and Deleuze conceive meaning-making through permanent oscillation between the subjective accounts of a meaning and its collective interpretation. These two dimensions are not in conflict but create meaning through their interdependence. On the basis of this interdependence, we can conceive of an interpretive analysis of emotions as a way to study language means that label particular emotions as relevant, legitimized, or useful. This shift of the debate on emotions away from what emotions are and toward what they mean enhances the critical shape of interpretive analysis of emotions because it uncovers conflicts hidden behind the veil of allegedly neutral policy instruments.
The article explores one of the biggest controversies over sustainability in modern Czech history, a protracted conflict over whether the Brno railway station should be re-built in a new location. By examining the language of the interaction between a ‘modernizing discourse’ and a ‘sustainability discourse’, the article highlights reflexivity as analytic enterprise that bares the governance dimension of policy conflicts. The reflexive analysis focuses on how actors justify their positions, how they distinguish themselves from their opponents and how they express trust in their own group. It reveals that both discourses are not only related to the re-location issue per se, but that they entail contested notions of legitimate knowledge and modes of governance. Since such power contest is common in sustainability controversies, the reflexive analysis suggests a novel analytical agenda for addressing policy conflicts in sustainability issues.
The article suggests that we can develop a better understanding of the dynamic of governing in social policies through the lens of ‘intimacy’. Intimacy – a deep personal knowledge about body and mind which changes during the dying process – encompasses validation of one’s emotional experience. In that way, intimacy links the emotional content of dying to discursive dimensions of dignity usually associated with end-of-life care. The analysis describes how the Czech organization Homecoming has constructed its concept of end-of-life care on intimacy, and in so doing, steers specific meanings in the policy field. Hence, intimacy suggests paying more attention to modes of ‘sharing a meaning’, through which policies come to be. The article mediates between psychosocial theorizing of emotions, poststructuralist policy analysis, and current debates on governing in health care and social policies in order to uncover the role of intimacy in the dynamics of governing.
Books Written:
Debates on the end-of-life controversy have become highly complex in recent decades as they seem to highjack national and cultural traditions. Whereas previous analyses have focused on the ideological grounds of these discussions, this book turns to intimacy of dying and discloses it as the site where policies are formulated, negotiated and implemented. Intimacy comprises the individual emotional experience of the end of life and the way it is acknowledged, or not, by institutions. The process of acknowledging this experience explains that the end-of-life controversy relies upon the conflicting relationship between the individual and institutions, a relationship that seemed to be the unquestionable cornerstone of Western liberal democracies. The move toward intimacy is both necessary and problematic. Through interviews with mourners, stakeholders and medical professionals, as well as through extensive examination of media debates, policy papers, and speeches in France and Czech Republic, the book describes that Liberal democratic institutions, while trying to accommodate and acknowledge the emotional experience with the end of life, ultimately fail and enter a dynamic of deadlock. The book describes this deadlock as the “politics of intimacy,” showing that political institutions deploy power through the collective acknowledgement of individual emotional experience but also fail to maintain this recognition because of this very same experience.