From 21 to 23 March, we welcomed Dr. Carola Fricke from Freiburg University as visiting fellow in Kaiserslautern as part of the project Linking Borderlands. Carola Fricke has studied political science, geography and public law and has published her dissertation on the European dimension of metropolitan policies. Since then, she conducted research on topics related to cross-border cooperation, policy learning and regional planning, among others.
With her interdisciplinary background, she could offer a distinctive perspective that was particularly helpful for our subproject Policy Borderlands which is concerned with policy learning in cross-border regions. Carola Fricke offered valuable insights on theoretical as well as empirical questions which we are currently concerned with in the project. Among others, we discussed an analytical framework on policy learning in cross-border contexts that we developed in the course of 2021 and that will be published in 2022. We also spoke about methodological approaches to trace policy learning and explored the possibilities of methods such as focus groups and planning games. Carola’s stay was completed by a meeting with Benjamin Blaser und Nino Pfundstein, both researchers at the department of spatial and environmental planning from TU Kaiserslautern who work in the subproject Planning Borderlands. Carola’s multi-disciplinary perspective has helped to further pursue intersections between the two subprojects which we are looking to expand in the upcoming months.
Stefanie Thurm