Dance Your PhD 2015 - Florence Metz

Описание: The PhD thesis underlying this dance video deals with the question of how to achieve effective water protection policies.
In order to design innovative water policies, the concerted action by diverse parts of society, economy, and politics is necessary.
In the video, several dancing styles (hip hop, house, salsa, acrobatics) stand for diverse political groups, which fight over the use and the protection of water resources.

Water bodies are symbolized by a fish bowl.
The environmentalist shown at the beginning of the video tries to protect the fish bowl (i.e. waters), while agriculture and industry aquire the fishbowl in order to use it as a sink for their effluents.
Societal issues, such as the overuse of waters, can attract the attention of the political realm.
In order to portray political agenda setting, the video shows a researcher, whose research results contribute to placing a societal issue on the political agenda.
After agenda setting, negotiations among different types of political groups start about how to solve an underlying issue. The video first presents a salsa dance, which symbolizes “the state”,
i.e. diverse governmental bodies that become active in the policymaking process.
Furthermore, the video shows a hip hop choreography representing agricultural groups, a house dance symbolizing industrial associations, and acrobatics embodying environmentalists.
With these groups, I seek to illustrate that in policymaking processes diverse interests express their policy preferences and fight over political influence.
The next scene in the video shows policy actors who form opposing coalitions and stand in conflict with each other.
It also illustrates that veto players, such as parliaments, can block the entire policymaking process through their no-vote on a legal act.
The video symbolizes veto players´ power through their action of turning out the music.
The next scene shows brokers, who mediate in policymaking processes between opposing coalitions in order to find common ground and overcome conflicts.
In the video, four people representing different interests look at each other and realize that they’re dancing the very same dance move, just in a slightly different style.
The same dance move symbolizes the common ground that brokers typically seek to promote.
The final choreography integrates dance moves from diverse styles (hip hop, house, salsa) in order to illustrate that through mutual exchange, policy designs have the potential to perform particularly well in solving an underlying policy issue such as improving water quality.

The dance video has a happy ending as the water in the fish bowl is finally clean again. Of course, reality is “slightly” more complex than the story in this dance video.
If you’re interested in finding out about the whole story, there is a lot of valuable research to explore in policy studies, environmental governance, and policy network research.

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Music Credits (CC-Licenses):

“Sound Opening” by Benedikt Wagner
“Weit oben” by Felix Friedrich, from Sound Cloud
“Opening par Songo 21” by SONGO 21, from Free Music Archive
“Ric Flair” by BenJamin Banger, from Free Music Archive
“Sugar Fairies” by Felix Friedrich, from Sound Cloud
„Hunger Pains“ by Audiobinger, from Free Music Archive
„Sueltate Prod By Dj Willie .R.F.C.L.W 2013“ by Kaiiny, from Sound Cloud
„Something Small“ by Minden, from Free Music Archive
“Dancing Like A Maniac” by Rey Izain, from Free Music Archive