In the last six years, Chile has carried out major reforms in school climate policy. However, these reforms are tied to two different realities that conflict with each other: a formative reality, which promotes a school climate of local decision-making and the improvement of school performance; and a punitive reality, which prioritizes improvement in the school climate through accountability protocols and regulations. We used Actor-Network Theory to describe the network of actors that underlie these realities. We analyzed key documents and conducted active interviews with actors responsible for the design and implementation of these policies. Results show that the assembled network enacts an accountability reality by means of the Law on Assurance of the Quality of Education, with key devices and s-objects performing the network. However, this enacted reality is at odds with a logic of school improvement that is still defended by the Ministry of Education, an actor that is no longer the main source of translation in the network. These results are discussed in light of the so-called “global triumph” of New Public Management through the dissemination of specific instruments that bring together subjects and objects in enacting the reality of accountability.

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Since the 1980s, accountability, performance measurement and competitiveness have been implemented in universities globally. It is the management logic known as New Public Management (NPM). But the NPM in contemporary academia is not understood without attending to the emergence of digital management devices and platforms (DMDs). It is the combination of both events that we have called the digital turn in university management. The implementation of DMDs is not a homogeneous and fully satisfactory process but is loaded with attempts, fails, and failures that need the voice of academics to be understood in its extension. This article presents the results of 40 interviews with academics about their experience and engagement with DMDs. The results point to the existence of at least three repertoires: 1) device-lover, 2) functionalpragmatic and 3) oppositionist-rejector. Together, these results point out that, on one hand, both the experience and the identity of the academic; and on the other hand, the relationship with the institutional context; both are the key to the successful implementation of the DMDs.

This article wants to explore the associative relationship between epidemics, lack of hygiene and foreignness that German people, politicians and the German press have made repeatedly during the recent wave of migration from Syria to Germany. It wants to especially look at the emotions of fear, anger and the resulting hate that not only pull these two things together but that combine being a health risk and being a stranger in a way that they create a vicious circle in which one perpetuates the other and creates a condition in which one always serves as a justification for the other.We will present the relationships among fear, anger, and hate empirically by reflecting on a few interviews carried out in Germany, three press articles and people's comments in the press, on Facebook and other social media that have surfaced after a small outbreak of scabies in a refugee camp in the Jenfelder Moorpark in Hamburg. The outbreak was neither medically meaningful nor caused by a lack of the refugees' hygiene, but rather as a consequence of the bad hygienic conditions that were to be found in the provisional refugee camp. However, this little but crucial part of information never really entered into the wider public debate -partly because the local German press only focused on the outbreak itself rather than on its causes and partly because the current social context has created a lack of confidence in the press, from both sides of civil society. Instead of critical reflections on causes and backgrounds, the majority of commenting readers pronounced publically the hypothetical link between their fears of both foreigners and epidemics and used the story as a bond-maker, allowing them to create a collective emotional reaction with others based on their projected fears. Within this process of collective projection fear turned into anger, as a collective form to face individual fear, resulting in the sensation of a need for collective self-defence, a sensation that their Society Must be Defended (Foucault, 2003 Defended, Foucault, 2003).

From the beginning of our civilization, the existence of infectious and contagious diseases required a search for solutions for both an individual and medical-health problem, and political interventions that involve a territory and population that must be managed. In this respect, epidemiology constitutes a strategic dimension in analysing the complex relationships established between scientific conduct and the political management of a territory. With this focus, we will provide a short historic genealogy of the links established between medicine and politics in European societies since the 18th century. From this, we should be able to see a movement from the concepts of healthiness/unhealthiness common to the ‘public hygiene’ managed by the 19th-century nation-state, towards the imperative of ‘public health’ operating with the ‘global health’ concept promoted by our current global institutions.