Children between Czech Family Stereotype and Norwegian Welfare System

The aim of the project is to raise awareness of media representations of practices of Norwegian Welfare Services in the Czech media. The project will be founded on discursive analysis of one significant case in which the Czech media were thoroughly interested in Norwegian welfare system.

The main planned activities will be:

• Creating the network and kick-off meeting: A preparatory meeting attended through Skype connection by the major Norwegian researcher – focused on creating a functional Czech-Norwegian team - will take place at Metropolitan University Prague (further MUP) (Month 1 of the life-cycle of the project).
• Expert meeting and workshop in Norway: The content of the second activity will be a working meeting of the two teams in Norway. Czech project team (5 people) will visit Norwegian institution in order to compare the analytics and tools for the analysis and to discuss the framework of the methodology of the project (Month 4-5 of the life-cycle of the project).
• Team meeting and International workshop in Prague: Public workshop attendance will be stimulated by a PR campaign. Public lectures of the international workshop will also be streamed at the web page of the project. The workshop will be based on the topic of media literacy whereas together with the Team meeting and International workshop will also promote the Norwegian Funds itself and spread public knowledge about this kind of Czech-Norwegian scientific cooperation. The representative of the Norwegian Embassy will be invited. (Month 10 of the life-cycle of the project).
• Seminar about media representation of intercultural problems: The seminar (in Prague Creative Centre) will be devoted to the analysis of media representation of Child Welfare Service. The expected visitors will be teachers and students working on the pre-school level and primary school level. (Month 11 of the life-cycle of the project).
• Scholarly article: The article focuses on analysis of narratives constructed the structure of media representation of this case. The main narratives framing the case were defined by the claim of “fundamental importance of family ties ignored by de-humanized administrative system”.