Based on 13 interviews with Eritrean status holders and professionals in Amsterdam this article explores how paying attention to media skills and media literacies may help gain a better understanding of what matters in exchanges between professionals and legal refugees in the mandatory Dutch integration process. Media literacy needs to be decolonised in order to do so. Starting as an inquiry into how professionals and their clients have different ideas of what constitutes “inclusive communication,” analysis of the interviews provides insight into how there is a need to (a) renegotiate citizenship away from the equation of neoliberal values with good citizenship and recognising needs and ambitions outside a neoliberal framework, (b) rethink components of formal and informal communication, and (c) reconceptualise media literacies beyond Western‐oriented definitions. We propose that professionals and status holders need to understand how and when they (can) trust media and sources; how what we might call “open‐mindedness to the media literacy of others” is a dialogic performative skill that is linked to contexts of time and place. It requires self‐reflective approach to integration, and the identities of being a professional and an Eritrean stakeholder. Co‐designing such media literacy training will bring reflexivity rather than the more generic term “competence” within the heart of both media literacy and inclusive communication.
Scientific research from within and beyond academia continues to provide the justification and the knowledge for policy developments directed toward migration and integration governance. A proliferation of scholarship aims to study, pilot, and investigate the ‘best practices’ for facilitating integration, which is then taken up in advice to policy makers. Many authors have written about this science-policy nexus (Boswell 2009; Penninx, Garcés-Mascareñas, and Scholten 2005; Scholten et al. 2015; Verbeek, Entzinger, and Scholten 2015) These works have also engaged in critical reflection, problematizing this nexus and demonstrating how funding structures draw researchers not only into addressing short-term policy goals, but also into reproducing some of the essentialist worldviews that come with methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) and the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995). Yet, the colonial legacies and dis/continuities of these logics in integrationism have not received much attention so far.The paper takes a critical lens on the implications of the science-policy complicity in reproducing colonial logics of ‘cultural distance’, based on perspectives and empirical research from different national (Netherlands and Switzerland) and supra-national (EU) contexts. We analyse texts which shape the civic integration programme in the Netherlands, the genealogy of the integration requirement to respect the values of the constitution in Switzerland, and the EU framework on migrant integration. This combined analysis brings forth the role scientists and knowledge producers play in (re)producing the colonial logics within integrationism, and their contributions to the regime of truth within which integration discourse operates. Throughout this article, we draw on examples from these different contexts to display that integration and its migranticized (Dahinden 2016) subjects are constructed through practices deemed as scientific or objective expertise, building on important work by Schinkel (2018) on integration research as “neocolonial knowledge production” and Favell’s (2022) critical reflections on integration indicator frameworks. As we demonstrate, the “idea of integration as an issue of cultural distance is rendered imaginable in and through colonial legacies and scientific practices from which policy draws legitimacy. We show how cultural distance is produced in the scientification of migrants’ assimilability in a ‘Western work ethic’, in measurement of migrants’ adherence to liberal values, and through constructions of integration drawing on social imaginaries of national and European identity. Importantly, we argue that by presenting this cultural distance as a product of objective, scientific processes of empirical observation, the notion of cultural distance is normalised and depoliticized, which ultimately legitimizes integrationism as a mode of governance.The present study builds on important contributions (by Schinkel 2017; Favell 2022; Korteweg 2017; Bonjour and Duyvendak 2017, and others) in attempting to destabilize the normalization of integrationism as the widely accepted mode of governance of ‘immigrant’ or ‘ethnic’ populations and their inherent and problematic ‘distance’. The content and structure of this summer school in post-colonial Amsterdam would allow us to continue our critical reflexive discussions to better understand the colonial logics at play and how they operate in multiple contexts and at multiple levels of governance, in and beyond integration
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Purpose This study aims to enhance understanding of the collaboration between chairs of nurse councils (CNCs) and members of executive hospital boards (BM) from a relational leadership perspective. Design/methodology/approach The authors used a qualitative and interpretive methodology. The authors study the daily interactions of BM and CNCs of seven Dutch hospitals through a relational leadership lens. The authors used a combination of observations, interviews and document analysis. The author’s qualitative analysis was used to grasp the process of collaborating between BM and CNCs. Findings Knowing each other, relating with and relating to are distinct but intertwined processes that influence the collaboration between BM and CNC. The absence of conflict is also regarded as a finding in this paper. Combined together, they show the importance of a relational process perspective to understand the complexity of collaboration in hospitals. Originality/value Collaboration between professional groups in hospitals is becoming more important due to increasing interdependence. This is a consequence of the complexity in organizing qualitative care. Nevertheless, research on the process of collaborating between nurse councils (NCs) and executive hospital boards is scarce. Furthermore, the understanding of the workings of boards, in general, is limited. The relational process perspective and the combination of observations, interviewing and document analysis proved valuable in this study and is underrepresented in leadership research. This process perspective is a valuable addition to skills- and competencies-focused leadership literature.
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