Episode 1: Introduction
Welcome to my first podcast. This is the first episode of my podcast in which I will talk about my research project which I just started in Feb 2023.
But first I’ll briefly introduce myself. I am Julia Dahlvik, I’m a sociologist and currently working at the University of Applied Sciences FH Campus Wien in Vienna, Austria. I am researching and teaching at the Department of Public Management and before that I have been working at different research institutes and teaching at several universities in Austria. In my research I have always been particularly interested in the relation between citizens and the state, and in particular the public administration. I am primarily using different qualitative methods and I particularly like being in the field and engaging with people. For my dissertation I have studied the administrative practices of asylum decision making and most recently I have been studying the work of public ombuds institutions.
And this is also the topic that I continue to work on in my current project. The project I will be discussing in this podcast is funded by the Austrian Science Fund, more specifically by the Elise Richter program, and the project is funded for a duration of four years.
I plan to use this podcast to give an insight into the overall research process, from the beginning to the end.
I would be happy to make this podcast a bit interactive, so if you have any questions or comments please send me an email, you will find my address on my website, and I will try to answer or integrate it in the next episode.
Let me first outline in very general terms what this study actually about:
The starting point of my investigation is that digitalization is increasing everywhere around the globe and it concerns different parts of our daily lives. The aspect that I have been particularly interested in in my research so far is citizens’ interaction with the state, especially the administrative bodies, and getting their rights as citizens. And this is also the key question of this study: How do citizens interact with the state, or rather with the administration, regardless of the issue concerned, in an increasingly digitalized world - what are their experiences, positive and negative? At this point, public ombuds institutions come into play as they are on the one hand responsible for monitoring the public administration’s actions and on the other hand they are there to guarantee citizens access to justice, in particular administrative justice. In that function, the ombuds, as they are also called, are the perfect observation posts for studying which problems citizens encounter when they interact with the administration, in all the different ways, including analogous as well as digital means. And of course, to understand citizens’ experiences, it is crucial to not only get the ombuds’ perspective but also talk to citizens. So this is the main interest of this study.
But, to make things a little more complicated, there is another aspect I am interested in: To what extent are the challenges citizens encounter and the measures that public administrations and ombuds undertake to ensure equal access to justice in the context of digitalization similar or different in different local contexts around the world? There is not very much empirical research about the matters that I have mentioned just now, but the existing research focuses to a large extent on the situation in European countries, and we see quite some commonalities, for instance, in who are the main users of ombuds institutions. For this reason, the lack of data from around the globe, I have decided to study the situation in different geographical areas outside Europe. I will tell you more about the selected countries and the reasons for choosing them in the next episode. I hope you have now got an understanding of the key aim of my research.
In the remainder of this episode I will share with you briefly what happened so far in the project.
Together my colleague Ruth Siebenaller, who assists me in the project, we have produced a literature review on access to ombuds institutions in the context on legal culture and legal consciousness.
Much of the time has also gone to organizing field access - more on that issue next time - and other organizational issues, including such mundane problems as buying a good recorder suitable for both interviews and podcasts.
A highlight of the first half year was definitely the possibility to meet ombudspersons from around the world, since there was a Board Meeting of the IOI in Vienna, where the IOI has its seat. This came of course very handy for me since I am also based in Vienna and I thought it would be a formidable opportunity to talk to ombudspersons face-to-face about my study and discuss with them the possibility to do research in their institution.
Another rather time-consuming activity was the mandatory application for a research license in NWT, Canada - so now you already know one of the countries I will visit ; and for that application my proposal first had to go through the Ethics Commission of my university. Overall, it was a quite long but an interesting process. I will say something about that also in the next episode.
The last point I want to mention are the conferences I participated in so far. Although, of course, there are no research findings yet, it was definitely helpful to discuss my study design and get input from expert colleagues.
In June, there was the ISA conference in Melbourne; since I participated virtually, and due to the time difference I had my presentation at 2.30 in the morning, which was an interesting experience. It was a session on institutional ethnography in socio-legal research, presented my research design and some questions about field access. As I already mentioned, I will dedicate more time to this issue in the next episode. At the same conference, I also organized and chaired a session on sociology of complaints and complaints bodies with highly interesting contributions from India, Australia and the UK.
Beginning of July, I presented at the conference of the Austrian Sociological Association, which was held in Vienna; my presentation here was particularly about the commonalities in the barriers to access to justice and the barriers related to digitalization which are in fact very similar since they include factors such as literacy as well as costs, availability of infrastructure, personal resources and skills and so on.
End of August, the conference of the ISA RCSL took place in Lund, Sweden; there I discussed the theoretical approaches I am working with in my research.
Last but not least I also want to mention that together with my colleague Axel Pohn-Weidinger we just recently published a Special Issue on the ’Sociology of complaints and complaint bodies’ in the German Journal of Law and Society. It has become a great collection of papers with contributions from the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. Have a look at them if this sounds interesting to you!
So, that was it for now. Thank you for listening and let me know if you have any questions, comments or suggestions!
Stay tuned.
