CAS SEE Seminars with Guests - Paul Stubbs and Noémi Lendvai-Bainton

On Thursday, December 17th, we hosted CAS SEE Weekly Seminar with Paul Stubbs and Noémi Lendvai-Bainton, presented by our fellow Tanja Anđić. The talk is entitled: The Temporalities of Policy Translation in the Semi-Periphery: revisiting the Europeanisation of welfare reforms in Central and South East Europe.

This presentation seeks to conceptualise time and temporality in the semi-periphery, with a particular focus on the transnational dimensions of policy translation. In particular, we show how, albeit within the co-existence of multiple temporalities, ‘policy time’ and ‘time in policy’ are structured in dominance and tend to enable and privilege particular kinds of policy processes over others. The presentation addresses a number of themes from our ethnographic work on social policy reform drawn from the post-Yugoslav and Hungarian contexts. We place particular emphasis on problematizing processes of ‘Europeanisation’ as well as the temporalities of policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploring the spatio-temporal dimensions of policy processes, we address key challenges in terms of how to treat time within critical policy studies.

Paul Stubbs is a UK‐born sociologist who has lived and worked in Croatia since 1993. He is currently Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Economics, Zagreb. His work focuses on policy translation, social protection, and the history of the non‐aligned movement. His latest book, co‐edited with Sofiya An, Bob Deacon and Tatiana Chubarova, is Social Policy, Poverty, and Inequality in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Agency and Institutions in Flux (CROP/ibidem, 2019). He is on the editorial board of Critical Policy Studies and the Croatian Journal of Social Policy. He is editing a book on Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement to be published by McGill-Queens’ University Press. He has just completed a two-year term as Co-President of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy (ASAP) of the American Anthropological Association.

Noémi Lendvai‐Bainton is a Hungarian‐born academic who has been working in the United Kingdom since 2002. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Public Policy at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, UK. Her research interests include post‐communist welfare states, EU integration, EU social policy, global social policy and the impact of international organizations, East–West migration, comparative research methods and critical policy studies. Her book, co‐authored with John Clarke, David Bainton and Paul Stubbs, Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage (Policy Press, 2015), explores ‘translation’ as a possible new theoretical lens for critical policy studies. She has also widely published on the transformation and Europeanization of post‐communist welfare states.