Institute for Policy and Governance, School of Public and International Affairs

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    Report to the Virginia Department of Veterans Services Virginia Wounded Warrior Program: Assessing the Experiences, Supportive Service Needs and Service Gaps of Veterans in the Commonwealth of Virginia Final Report
    Still, George; Dickerson, Thomas; White, Nancy; Sforza, Peter M.; Schroeder, Aaron; Willis-Walton, Susan M. (Virginia Tech Institute for Policy & Governance, 2010-08-05)
    The Commonwealth of Virginia is the home to over 800,000 veterans who have served in conflicts ranging from World War II to the current engagements in the gulf region, Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF/Iraq) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF/Afghanistan). The Virginia Wounded Warrior Program has been charged with coordinating and facilitating the services that are needed by Virginia’s veterans who have served in the United States military. In order to evaluate how to best serve and facilitate services for these veterans, the VWWP has commissioned a needs assessment of Virginia’s veterans that is summarized in this report.
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    Virginia Star Quality Initiative Family Child Care Home Provider Demonstration Pilot Evaluation Report
    Bradburn, Isabel S.; Dunkenberger, Mary Beth; White, Nancy; Allen, Elizabeth (Virginia Tech Child Development Center for Learning and Research, 2011-08-05)
    The Virginia Star Quality Initiative (VSQI) family child care home demonstration project was a pilot quality rating and improvement program designed to provide intensive professional development services to family child care home providers. The pilot project took place between October 1, 2010, and June 30, 2011, and was funded by federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act monies awarded to the Virginia Department of Social Services. The Virginia Early Childhood Foundation (VECF) piloted the family child care home provider program as an extension of the classroom‐based VSQI, currently in its fifth year of a pilot phase. Through a competitive process, VECF selected six geographically and culturally diverse regions encompassing 35 Virginia localities to participate, with a recruitment target of 75 licensed family child care providers. Regions included nine localities in the Southwest (coordinated by Smart Beginnings Appalachia), Arlington/Alexandria, six localities in Central Virginia (coordinated by Smart Beginnings Central Virginia), Fairfax, seven localities in the Greater Richmond area (coordinated by the Richmond Resource and Referral Agency, ChildSavers) and five localities in South Hampton Roads (coordinated by Smart Beginnings South Hampton Roads and The Planning Council).
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    Policy Brief: Veterans’ Health Care In Rural Virginia
    Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Goverance (Virginia Rural Health Association, 2011-12)
    The Commonwealth of Virginia is home to an estimated 748,3451 military veterans, ranging in age from centenarian, pre‐World War II veterans, to teenage veterans recently returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan). These veterans are faced with wide‐ranging and complex health needs, which are further complicated if they live in rural regions of the Commonwealth. Research and study undertaken by the Virginia Rural Health Association (VRHA) and the Virginia Wounded Warrior Program (VWWP) identify major veteran health care issues such as the inclusiveness and accessibility of health care, coordination of health care services, the availability of health care services in a veteran’s community, and the cultural competency of health care providers serving veterans. A primary challenge facing Virginia’s program and policy leaders is how to leverage state, federal, and local resources to meet the health care needs of all Virginia veterans.
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    Virginia Tech Peer Institution Diversity & Inclusion Comparative Study: A Review of Virginia Tech Peer Institutions’ Compositional Dynamics, Organizational Structures, and Assessment, Planning and Evaluation Practices
    Dunkenberger, Mary Beth; Lo, Suzanne (Virginia Tech, 2013)
    A systematic review of Virginia Tech’s peer institutions and the institutions’ organizational contexts for diversity and inclusion programs has been undertaken for the purposes of benchmarking Virginia Tech’s processes for assessment, planning and evaluation. Comparative analysis has increasingly been utilized by institutions of higher education to inform decision-making, resource allocation and organizational change (Trainer, 2008). However, little, if any, comparative research has been focused on the organizational structures, programs and processes for the promotion of diversity and inclusion within our institutions of higher education. This study and its findings seek to begin to fill this informational gap and to assist Virginia Tech leadership in supporting its diversity and inclusion structures.
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    Re: Reflections and explorations : Essays on politics, public policy, and governance
    Stephenson, Max O. Jr.; Kirakosyan, Lyusyena (Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance, 2015)
    We have organized the essays that follow in this volume into nine themes or broad topical foci based on the subjects our RE: Reflections and Explorations authors selected for their efforts during 2013-2014. A brief overview of our contributors’ organizing issues follows. Part 1 contains six essays that address the role(s) of the academy in society. Part 2 offers six essays that address questions central to the relationships among art, culture and politics. Part 3’s five essays treat issues linked to community building. Part 4 includes five essays that explore the challenges of public leadership at multiple scales and in a variety of contexts. Part 5’s eight essays examine a variety of concerns central to the characteristics and fundamentals of democratic citizenship and ethics. Part 6 consists of six essays that explore different dimensions of international politics. Part 7 of the volume comprises seven essays that directly or indirectly illuminate alternate facets of local and international development dynamics. Part 8 includes six essays that together analyze several manifestations or implications of neoliberalism, the current dominant public imaginary or frame in American and indeed, Western, politics. Part 9’s seven essays each afford readers alternate lenses into the dynamics and vicissitudes of change processes, as conceptualized at alternate analytical levels. The 56 essays together address a variety of concerns central to democratic politics and self-governance. The topics are as varied as our contributor’s substantive interests and perspectives, and that diversity yields a complex array of analytical insights. We hope you enjoy reading this richly textured collection as much as we have enjoyed assembling it.
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    RE: Reflections and Explorations: A Forum for Deliberative Dialogue
    Stephenson, Max O. Jr.; Kirakosyan, Lyusyena (Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance in association with VT Publishing, 2017)
    The essays in this volume treat dimensions of broader trends at all scales of analysis, examining the elemental issue of democratic agency and obstacles to its exercise, the difficulties inherent for self-governance in inter-governmental cooperation and in racial, ethnic and religious diversity and the antagonisms resulting from rapid widespread economic, social and technological shifts. These articles also investigate the dynamics of political change and movements in a time when the prevailing social imaginary makes such action, always difficult, especially tough to achieve. While we have divided the essays into seven sections, as they address a variety of topical concerns at discrete levels of analysis, all may be said to treat in one form or another the consequences for Western liberalism of its embrace of neoliberalism’s elevation of capitalism to a governing role and its view of freedom as atomistic individualism. Adherents have embraced this perspective without acknowledging the daily reality that human beings live in families and societies and that freedom will never be sustained by the pursuit of material goods alone.
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    Virginia Tech Institute for Policy & Governance Quarterly Newsletter, January 2017
    (Virginia Tech, 2017-01)
    This quarterly newsletter provides updates on activities in IPG, including news, student and faculty accomplishments, and a director's letter.
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    Virginia Tech Institute for Policy & Governance Quarterly Newsletter, April 2017
    (Virginia Tech, 2017-04)
    This quarterly newsletter provides updates on activities in IPG, including news, student and faculty accomplishments, and a director's letter.
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    Virginia Tech Institute for Policy & Governance Quarterly Newsletter, July 2017
    (Virginia Tech, 2017-07)
    This quarterly newsletter provides updates on activities in IPG, including news, student and faculty accomplishments, and a director's letter.
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    Virginia Tech Institute for Policy & Governance Quarterly Newsletter, October 2017
    (Virginia Tech, 2017-10)
    This quarterly newsletter provides updates on activities in IPG, including news, student and faculty accomplishments, and a director's letter.
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    Virginia Tech Institute for Policy & Governance Quarterly Newsletter, January 2018
    (Virginia Tech, 2018-01)
    This quarterly newsletter provides updates on activities in IPG, including news, student and faculty accomplishments, and a director's letter.
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    Virginia Tech Institute for Policy & Governance Quarterly Newsletter, April 2018
    (Virginia Tech, 2018-04)
    This quarterly newsletter provides updates on activities in IPG, including news, student and faculty accomplishments, and a director's letter.
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    Virginia Tech Institute for Policy & Governance Quarterly Newsletter, July 2018
    (Virginia Tech, 2018-07)
    This quarterly newsletter provides updates on activities in IPG, including news, student and faculty accomplishments, and a director's letter.
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    Fragile Foundations and Enduring Challenges: Essays on Democratic Politics and Governance
    Stephenson, Max O. Jr. (VT Publishing, 2019-05-22)
    In this volume of timely essays, Max O. Stephenson Jr. offers unique insight into the state of politics and policymaking in the United States. Covering the period 2010-2018, his essays chronicle a growing crisis in American governance with many of the nation’s professed values and principles increasingly under attack—including the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the ability of a share of its citizens otherwise eligible to vote to exercise their right to do so. But Stephenson does more than sound a warning cry. He urges all Americans to reclaim self-governance and democracy by embracing the central values and core purposes underpinning the United States. Max O. Stephenson Jr. is Professor of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech where he also directs the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance (VTIPG).
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    Sport for All and Social Inclusion of Individuals with Impairments: A Case Study from Brazil
    Kirakosyan, Lyusyena (MDPI, 2019-06-01)
    This article examines the discourses about Sport for All (SFA) and their evolution over the past four decades in Brazil and analyzes the implications of those discourses for social inclusion of Brazilians with impairments in sport and leisure. It provides an overview of four political milestones in the development of sport participation in Brazil: the launch of the SFA program under the military dictatorship; the adoption of the 1988 Constitution; the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and the Rio 2016 Paralympics. Foucault’s archaeological-genealogical approach has been used to explain how the principle of social inclusion has been practised and enacted through the SFA discourses in Brazil and to discuss the implications of sport and leisure policies for the population with impairments.
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    Arts as Dialogic Practice: Deriving Lessons for Change from Community-based Art-making for International Development
    Kirakosyan, Lyusyena; Stephenson, Max O. Jr. (MDPI, 2019-06-20)
    Communities around the world struggle with weakening social bonds and political, racial, ethnic, economic, and cultural divides. This article argues the arts can be a means of raising public consciousness regarding such concerns by catalyzing conscious, thoughtful dialogue among individuals and groups possessing diverse values and beliefs. Change can only occur when people become aware of and actively reflect on the ontological and epistemic-scale norms and values that so often underpin their divisions, and the arts can help them do precisely that. We examine the dynamics of participatory performing arts and mural-making in diverse contexts to contend that the dialogic character of community art-making can be valuable for practitioners and scholars in a variety of efforts in international community development. We conclude by sharing lessons that we believe will aid artists and practitioners in devising more inclusive and participatory approaches to their international community change or development projects.
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    Educational Legacy of the Rio 2016 Games: Lessons for Youth Engagement
    Kirakosyan, Lyusyena (MDPI, 2020-05-28)
    The promise of the Rio 2016 Games was to influence the entire population of Brazil, but the major impact was expected to be on children and the youth. The development of youth education programs promoting Olympic and Paralympic values was one of the main commitments that organizers made in 2009 to host the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games. This article draws on the available literature on Olympic and Paralympic education and youth engagement and examines several of such programs previously implemented in such host cities as Beijing, Vancouver, and London. The purpose was to explore the ways in which implementing such educational legacy programs by the Rio 2016 and other sporting mega-event organizers can inspire and sustain youth engagement. The inductive thematic analysis was applied in the close examination of the content, strategies, and outcomes of the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic education program. The results suggest that to leave an enduring youth legacy, policymakers, future mega-event organizers, and educators need to understand it as a continued endeavor beyond the hosting period and embed the related educational efforts into broader educational and youth-focused structures. This article also outlines lessons for youth engagement that can be drawn from Rio’s and other host cities’ Olympic and Paralympic education practices.
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    Community Social Polarization and Change: Evidence from Three Recent Studies
    Stephenson, Max O. Jr.; Abella-Lipsey, Beng; Nagle, Lara; Moayerian, Neda (MDPI, 2020-05-29)
    This review article analyzes three major recent books (written by Robert Wuthnow, Arlie R. Hochschild, and James and Deborah Fallows, respectively) concerning ongoing political, economic and social change in United States’ rural communities to probe differing frames and claims among them. We contend these works together point to vital social and political forces that must receive increased attention if the communities they treat are to address the challenges confronting them successfully. Thereafter, we briefly and illustratively underscore the significance of these authors’ arguments using our own ongoing work in two small communities confronting catastrophic economic decline and social fissuring in Central Appalachia. Overall, we argue that an analytical approach that combines elements of Wuthnow’s sensitivity to demographic and scalar polarization and divides, coupled with Hochschild’s emphasis on opportunities to instill and call on empathetic imagination in development efforts, could assist these rural communities’ residents to understand more fully the dynamics at play within them and to craft strategies aimed at addressing those challenges. In particular, we contend that the Fallowses’ call for pragmatic interventions and partnership building must be accompanied by long-term efforts to overcome the fear engendered by the view that rural community life constitutes a consumerist zero-sum game, and the accompanying widespread belief in those jurisdictions that scapegoating and explicit or implicit racialized hierarchies represent reasonable responses to such anxieties.
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    VTIPG newsletter, October 2020
    (Virginia Tech, 2020-10)
    This quarterly newsletter provides updates on activities in IPG, including news, student and faculty accomplishments, and a letter from the director.
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    VTIPG News, January 2021
    (Virginia Tech, 2021-01)
    This quarterly newsletter provides updates on activities at the institute, including news, student and faculty accomplishments, and a letter from the director.