TY - GEN

T1 - Democracy and Social Inequalities in the Organization of Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic

T2 - 3rd International Conference on Quantitative Ethnography, ICQE 2021

AU - Schnaider, Karoline

AU - Schiavetto, Stefano

AU - Spikol, Daniel

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - Challenges that arise during a time of crisis, as the current COVID-19 pandemic, are a basis for recognizing how different governments handle the governance of units such as schools and issues related to democracy and social inequality. By paying attention to similar or contrasting issues in the political welfare states’ characteristics and organization, the crisis's impact on different countries can be identified and can provide learning examples beyond the study's phenomena. Although Brazil and Sweden are historically and culturally diverse countries, they also share similarities in being politicized by global trends such as neoliberalism. The paper examines the two governments’ discourses and how centralization, decentralization, and neoliberalism and the resulting shift to privatized public services can form a basis for understanding declines in democracy and social inequality in education in both countries. The following research question guides the work, how are democracy and social inequality expounded in Brazil’s and Sweden’s way of organizing education during the COVID-19 pandemic? To investigate how democracy and social inequality were expounded in Brazil’s and Sweden’s way of organizing education during the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a quantitative ethnographic approach to analyze the governments’ discourses. With quantitative ethnographic techniques we identified how the states organized discussions and actions to investigate and solve socio-educational issues related to democracy and how access to resources for education related to inequalities. The governmental intensity of keeping the economy functioning was observed to be influenced by the advance of neoliberalism in both countries. In organizing the education during the COVID-19 pandemic, neoliberalism is pertaining to authoritarianism in Brazil and more culturally contingent actions related to the ethos - “openness” - in Sweden.

AB - Challenges that arise during a time of crisis, as the current COVID-19 pandemic, are a basis for recognizing how different governments handle the governance of units such as schools and issues related to democracy and social inequality. By paying attention to similar or contrasting issues in the political welfare states’ characteristics and organization, the crisis's impact on different countries can be identified and can provide learning examples beyond the study's phenomena. Although Brazil and Sweden are historically and culturally diverse countries, they also share similarities in being politicized by global trends such as neoliberalism. The paper examines the two governments’ discourses and how centralization, decentralization, and neoliberalism and the resulting shift to privatized public services can form a basis for understanding declines in democracy and social inequality in education in both countries. The following research question guides the work, how are democracy and social inequality expounded in Brazil’s and Sweden’s way of organizing education during the COVID-19 pandemic? To investigate how democracy and social inequality were expounded in Brazil’s and Sweden’s way of organizing education during the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a quantitative ethnographic approach to analyze the governments’ discourses. With quantitative ethnographic techniques we identified how the states organized discussions and actions to investigate and solve socio-educational issues related to democracy and how access to resources for education related to inequalities. The governmental intensity of keeping the economy functioning was observed to be influenced by the advance of neoliberalism in both countries. In organizing the education during the COVID-19 pandemic, neoliberalism is pertaining to authoritarianism in Brazil and more culturally contingent actions related to the ethos - “openness” - in Sweden.

KW - Democracy

KW - Education

KW - Organization

KW - Quantitative ethnography

KW - Social inequality

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-93859-8_20

DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-93859-8_20

M3 - Article in proceedings

AN - SCOPUS:85123614905

SN - 9783030938581

T3 - Communications in Computer and Information Science

SP - 298

EP - 317

BT - Advances in Quantitative Ethnography - 3rd International Conference, ICQE 2021, Proceedings

A2 - Wasson, Barbara

A2 - Zörgő, Szilvia

PB - Springer

Y2 - 6 November 2021 through 11 November 2021

ER -