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Nursing is a global profession and international collaboration of early-stage researchers (ESRs) builds their capacity as future nursing scientists. This discussion paper focuses on international collaboration of ESRs in nursing science. The aim of this paper was to clarify the optimal collaboration forms and identify challenges and recommendations for supporting individual researchers and organisations to strengthen international collaboration for the ESR phase. The paper is based on previous literature and authors' experiences in the collaboration between two countries by the Baltic Sea, Estonia and Finland. In future, more discussion is needed on how to establish international partnerships and collaboration in researcher career building globally: expanded and long-term collaboration is needed to develop nursing science but also to improve nursing care, patient outcomes and, finally, to benefit society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the growing literature on the varying degrees and dimensions of prisoner governance across prison systems, this paper aims to understand how such governance, and reforms to reduce its informal influences, shape prisoner experiences in Estonia and Lithuania. Estonia has limited the influence of prisoner governance through the creation of a cell-based prison system, while Lithuania has maintained penal colonies in which prisoners largely self-govern. Utilizing a metaphor approach to the pains of imprisonment, we offer the concept of an imposition gradient to capture variation in the experience of the weight and tightness produced by both prison authorities and prisoners themselves across our cases. The paper makes three contributions: first, it aims to explicitly assess the relationship between varieties of prisoner governance and penal subjectivities. Second, it rethinks the relatively static metaphors of weight and tightness as fluid and dynamic experiences shaped by the degrees of prisoner governance present within prison systems and particular spaces of particular prisons. Third, the paper speaks to recent appeals to develop comparative research into varieties of imprisonment regimes, deepening comparative theories of prison order across the Global North and South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a relational understanding of socio-spatial polarisation as a nested, multidimensional and multi-scalar process, the paper applies a comparative perspective on current trends of socio-spatial development in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Comparing current scholarship and data on demographic and economic processes of centralisation and peripheralisation, we also examine political debates around issues of polarisation in different scholarly national perspectives. Despite variations in national discourses, our comparative perspective conveys strong similarities between the three Baltic countries in terms of socio-economic and demographic concentration in the capital regions to the disadvantage of the rest of the country. The analysis of regional policies further points to tensions between a concern for territorial cohesion on the one hand, and an adherence to the neo-liberal logic of growth and competitiveness against the backdrop of post-socialist transition on the other hand. An overview of case studies in the three countries shows a common reliance on endogenous resources to foster local development, conforming to the neo-liberal logics of regional policy. However, these strategies remain niche models with different levels of success for the respective regions and also among the populations in the region. As a result, we argue for a stronger role of regional policy in the Baltic countries that goes beyond the capital regions by better addressing the negative consequences of uneven development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded in 'expectancy-value' theory, this paper reports on the psychometric properties of an instrument intended to measure students' motivation in mathematics. The participants were 2045 third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students from Estonia, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Serbia and Sweden. The Expectancy-Value Scale (EVS) was found to be suitable for early grades of primary education in measuring competence self-perceptions and subjective task values relative to the mathematics field. The results indicate a good model fit aligned with the expectancy-value theory. The EVS dimensions showed good reliability, and scalar invariance was established. However, findings also indicated high correlations between some of the EVS dimensions, which is well documented for students at this age. The findings are discussed relative to the 'expectancy-value' theory framework and students' age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the road corvée, a practice of using unpaid labour for road maintenance, in the nineteenth and twentieth century. I focus on the case of Estonia, where the road corvée, originating in the feudal economic system, persisted surprisingly long, being abolished only in 1959. Earlier studies on the road corvée have focused mainly on road construction and have therefore failed to recognise the use of the practice beyond absolutist Europe and colonial Africa. Focusing on maintenance reveals that the corvée was also widespread in twentieth-century Europe. I examine how the road corvée was organised and debated to reveal what inhibited and what accelerated its abolition. The study shows how maintenance practices can be deeply embedded in social and economic structures – like the agricultural system in this case – and ultimately be highly inert and resistant to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rising prevalence of digital data, infrastructures and platforms in education, the challenge of conceptualizing and investigating 'intermediaries' has substantially increased. This not only refers to various new types of actors that have been materializing around practices of data infrastructuring (e.g., data management), but equally to the rising empowerment of data infrastructures themselves as intermediaries of policy and governance. The aim of this article is to sharpen our conceptual understanding of this interrelation between intermediaries and data infrastructuring. More specifically, the article suggests to approach intermediaries through a lens on performative contexting, thus shifting the focus towards how 'intermediary contexting' is used, by whom and where exactly, rather than seeking to map intermediaries as an object 'from the outside'. Data infrastructuring, then, can be regarded both as part, and as a result, of such contexting efforts. Using Estonia as a case study, it is shown what we see (differently) when applying such a lens to the digital transformation of education. The findings hereby indicate a gradual emergence of what could be described as 'governance by intermediarization': a process in which more and more actors are shifted into the (self)contexting as infrastructural stewards, while the politics of digital transformation become centered – i.e., seemingly depoliticized – around asserting continuous change through digital connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author analyzes Estonia as a case study to explore two interrelated research questions – how exceptions are produced and reversed through the mechanisms of sovereignty and governmentality projected onto geo- and biopolitical domains, and how the new practices of exceptionalization and de-exceptionalization contribute to the emergence of a new spatial order at Europe's eastern margins? Three types of policies unfolded in Estonia as reactions to the Russian war against Ukraine are identified. First, the Estonian government introduced extraordinary measures based on the logic of national interests, which left much space for discretionary power to define risks, threats, and dangers. Secondly, some policy domains were intentionally de-exceptionalized for the sake of their better integration into Estonian normative space and as a reaction to the effects of the war. Third, in some cases there were exceptions from exceptions, which meant certain steps back toward normalization of the previously taken exceptional measures. The theoretical frame of the article consists of two nodal concepts – sovereignty and governmentality to be projected onto geo- and biopolitics treated as spheres in which sovereign and governmental powers operate and expose their political qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While empirical studies of research ethics and integrity are increasingly common, few have aimed at national scope, and even fewer at current results from Central and Eastern Europe. This article introduces the results of the first national research integrity survey in Estonia, which included all research-performing organisations in Estonia, was inclusive of all disciplines and all levels of experience. A web-based survey was developed and carried out in Estonia with a call sent to all accredited Estonian research institutions. The results indicate that the vast majority (89%) of respondents consider research ethics and integrity issues important and view falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism (FFPs) as the most severe forms of misconduct. Self-reporting of FFPs is generally comparable to levels published in other studies (6.2%). Gift authorship (41%) and hampering the work of a colleague (32%) were problematic practices most noticed among colleagues. At the same time, two of the noticed questionable research practices (QRPs) – salami-slicing and misuse of research funding – were seen as less severe, hinting at the existence of counter-norms that career advancement rules and structural factors like funding policies may encourage. The availability of research ethics and integrity guidelines was considered good. Ethical aspects of studying potentially stigmatising data in a very small research community are discussed in the article and results are analysed through counter-norms and normative dissonance frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social and ethical implications of large-scale biobank donor recruitment campaigns have remained understudied. We use two recent campaigns of the population-based genetic biobank in Estonia as an example to demonstrate how campaign spokespersons try to persuade potential donors by appealing to (1) gaining self-knowledge, (2) gaining control over one's health, (3) fear of illness, (4) contributing to healthcare, (5) contributing to science, and (6) contributing to one's country. While these campaigns succeeded in recruiting 15 percent of the country's adult population as donors, we explain how the use of some of these appeals may (a) create unrealistic expectations regarding the benefits donors could receive and (b) conceal the risks regarding health data. The study lays a necessary groundwork for future empirical research on the ethics of biobank recruitment campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walking has attracted increasing interest in the social sciences and humanities. Yet only rarely have studies in those disciplines considered the subject of traffic, leaving governing and regulations to traffic specialists and engineers. Primarily using conceptual reflections but intersecting these with an analysis of historical traffic regulations in Estonia as they are related to contemporary framings, this article introduces the pedestrian as an element of a traffic system who is governed to control her body in legally prescribed ways. Directing attention also to language, as the vignette from Estonia shows the existence of a particular word "liikleja" for the ways in which pedestrians are seen as being subject to the traffic system as disciplined elements of the traffic machine. The article describes such perspective as "traffic discourse" which is contrasted with the more holistic view of pedestrians present in walking studies ("walking discourse"). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing presence of technologies at school has triggered a vivid debate on the way ICT influences students' learning process. Using PISA 2018 data for 15-year-old students and hierarchical linear models, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between ICT use at school and students' performance in mathematics in 22 OECD countries. In all cases, the excessive use of technology is associated with a lower academic performance, although this penalty differs across countries, which points to the importance of addressing country-specific analyses. The differentiated profile of those very intensive users, who suffer from above-average bullying exposure, draws into question whether the effect can be deemed as causal. Based on Inverse Probability Weighting techniques, the findings indicate that the very intensive use of ICT at school causes an underperformance of students equivalent to around half an academic course in Estonia, Finland and Spain. The results highlight the need for policy makers and instructors to ensure that the frequent use of ICT at school does not interfere with students' learning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The military covenant is a set of morally binding expectations marking the exchange between military, society, and the state. Its base is the military's duality: like other large public institutions delivering services and its uniqueness in holding the monopoly over the use of legitimate organized state violence. The covenant is a form of relational (not transactional) contract based on trust between, and a long-term orientation of, partners; it both orders and displays these relations thereby offering both prescriptions for action and discursive means to legitimate them. The covenant can be used as an analytical (not normative) concept for theoretical development in three areas: social change and society-military ties, processual aspects of agreements between individuals and groups and the armed forces, and links between society-military ties and the social contract and social cohesion. We use the case of Estonia to illustrate the theoretical potential of the military covenant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study is to investigate the relationship between the experience of conscripts in their training period and their subsequent attitude toward national military service immediately after training. Self-report questionnaire is used to measure the experiences of Estonian conscripts (n = 518) in three categories: perceived stress, applied coping strategies, and evaluation of training as important. Attitude toward national military service is measured as a critical versus neutral/positive answer to an open-ended question. We found that a perceived reduction in general quality of life, concerns about what is happening at home, and experiencing/expressing negative emotions were associated with a critical attitude. In contrast, taking a proactive outlook toward training and finding military-specific aspects personally important were associated with a more neutral/positive attitude. Our findings emphasize the importance of improving the conscription training experience in order to foster less critical attitudes toward service and are discussed from a person-environment perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent evidence indicates that a word's paradigmatic neighbors affect production. However, these findings have mostly been obtained in careful laboratory settings using words in isolation, and thus ignoring potential effects that may arise from the syntagmatic context, which is typically present in spontaneous speech. The current corpus analysis investigates paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech. Following work on English, we focus on the duration of inflected and uninflected word-final /-s/ in content words, while simultaneously investigating whole words. Our analyses reveal three points. First, we find an effect of realized inflectional paradigm size, such that smaller paradigms actively used by the speakers lead to longer durations. Second, higher conditional probability is associated with shorter word forms and shorter segments. Finally, we do not directly replicate previous work on effects of inflectional status as in English word-final /-s/. Instead, we find that inflectional status interacts with conditional probability. We discuss the results in light of models of speech production and how they account for morphologically complex words and their paradigmatic neighbors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some ethnic nation-states committed to preferential treatment of the dominant nation choose to accommodate their ethnic minorities in some realms? I argue that power struggles between elected and non-elected officials account for the variation in the treatment of ethnic minorities. Fragmentation of authority creates opportunities for entrepreneurial bureaucrats to initiate policy changes and lead to unanticipated outcomes. Drawing on nationalism studies in comparative politics and principal-agent scholarship in public administration, this article outlines a theoretical framework focused on domestic factors accounting for variation in state policies toward minorities in a novel way. I apply this framework to education policy in Israel and Estonia vis-à-vis the Palestinian Arab and Russian-speaking minorities. This article illuminates an empirical puzzle of minority accommodation under nationalist governments and explains the conditions under which it occurs, offering generalizable theoretical expectations for similar contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies trade union revitalization within broader trends of projectification that marks a shift towards project work and its temporary organization. It accordingly compares instances of project-based organizational restructuring in post-crisis Estonia and Slovenia in order to identify their drivers, power resources employed and their outcomes and wider impact. In both countries, project-based organizational restructuring was driven by proactive activists capable of innovatively utilizing available power resources and new opportunity structures that had opened up with EU integration. While Slovenian unions utilized a more diverse set of power resources and revitalization strategies, activists in both countries stimulated trade union project-based organizational restructuring in order to initiate and sustain their main, context specific, revitalization strategies. Findings also show that project-based organizational restructuring can be an interim phase for unions to increase their resources and use them to turn their revitalization strategies into more permanent ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes historical monuments as instruments of Russia's attempts to impose its aesthetic hegemony in the post-Communist world. Drawing on case studies from the Czech Republic and Estonia, it argues that this hegemony is precarious and vulnerable due to inability to deal with the inherent ambiguity and complexity of historical events and figures. The Russian approach regards historical truth in absolute terms and is underpinned by a zero-sum game understanding of historical narratives. It does not tolerate a multiplicity of perspectives on history and has no appreciation for postmodernist deconstruction of historical symbols. This conflicts with a more diverse, reflexive and inclusive politics of memory as an intrinsic element of cityscapes of Prague and Tallinn where some of the controversial monuments connected with the Soviet occupation have been removed. Russia's reaction to these changes reveals an inherently vulnerable nature of its aesthetic hegemony which is deeply dependent on recognition of the absolute nature of its historical truth that the monuments are supposed to embody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interior insulation of historic buildings is well-studied in Central Europe; however, their conclusions might not be directly applicable to colder climates. Heat, air and moisture (HAM) modelling can be a valuable tool for studying those solutions in different conditions. Recently, incorporating the capillary condensation redistribution (CCR) test into the material characterization process has shown to cause dramatic improvement in correlating hygrothermal modelling results to measurements in certain situations. It is also noteworthy, that the HAM modelling errors made using material data from conventional characterization process can be severely non-conservative. In this article a parametric study of a 51 cm thick mass masonry wall is undertaken to determine the effect of the improved material properties on the reliability of a vapour open 'capillary active' autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) and calcium silicate (CaSi) interior insulation solutions and to compare them to a vapour tight insulation system. A 49-year real weather dataset from Estonia is used. The results show that compared to conventionally characterized material properties the CCR-optimized material data causes more critical conditions directly behind the interior insulation, while having a similar performance in the exterior part of the masonry. The differences occur close to the performance limits and highlight the importance of using the CCR test in material characterization process. The vapour tight and vapour open systems showed a very similar impact on the freeze-thaw cycles and on the maximum ice saturation of the exterior part of the masonry. The vapour open solutions perform better than the vapour tight PIR in terms of frost damage and possible mould growth behind the insulation – even though the advantage has been reduced when using the CCR-optimized material data. Regardless of the insulation solution, a case-specific approach is still required to avoid damaging the original wall and/or the added insulation system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do Estonians imagine themselves as a nation? According to a popular Estonian essayist, a proper Estonian digs his garden on Mondays and mines his bitcoins on Tuesdays. This article focuses on Estonian imaginaries to study the grounding structures of Estonian identity-creation in the 2010s and it articulates the core of a canonized understanding of Estonian identity as "eco-digital nationhood." The article explores Estonia's eco-digital national model as produced by an aesthetic screening, supported by a Western gaze adapted for local purposes of positive identity creation. In Estonia, international approval (for its reputation as a digital nation) has fostered a national self-image of living in a digital state. Technological advancement combined with idealizations of natural environments have sometimes produced "eco-ambiguous" results, as in efforts to encounter nonhuman life-worlds without leaving one's own comfort zone. In other instances, the eco and the digital function as two alternating modes of selfhood, the eco-part sometimes finding expression in the narratives of ethnic particularism, the digital part figuring Estonia as a herald of western modernism prudently adapting itself to the digital future. Discrepancies between the eco-digital imaginary and the many less flattering elements of Estonian actuality highlight selective (self-)representative strategies in narratives of national success. Nation building here emerges as a metonymic process, wherein certain parts of culture are foregrounded to represent the whole—while other parts, including substantial parts of the Soviet heritage (material, demographic, social, psychological) languish as unsuitable to be framed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stuart Cunningham's important contribution to media innovation studies is the work towards a unique combination of evolutionary economics and innovation systems studies with the studies of media and culture. Therein Cunningham's special contribution has been in highlighting the related novel implications for media and creative industries policy making. This essay exemplifies how some of these implications have been addressed in Estonia and how Cunningham's work can be combined with new ideas on designing value-driven innovation systems as 'national missions' in order to address the risks of global platformisation for media and other creative sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss how memorials exist in time by conceptualising memory politics in relation to monumental neglect and a lack of maintenance work. I also study the way political discourses have material resonances by foregrounding how the Soviet memory is silenced in Estonia through the crumbling materiality of its cultural heritage – as a slow-motion sacrifice. In my research, I focused on the Maarjamäe memorial complex in Tallinn (which comprises a Soviet monumental landscape design, a cemetery of German soldiers, a Russian palace currently hosting the Estonian History Museum and the newly-built memorial of Victims of Communism), to show how part of it has been devalued by the political work of disrepair and institutional neglect, thus presenting the socialist past as something separated from the present. New developments at this site might potentially change its situation of abandonment since the construction of a novel antagonist element – the memorial of Victims of Communism – might produce a more attentive maintenance of the Soviet monumental design (adding another layer of meaning), or its final demolition in turn (thus producing a haunting afterlife). In any case, Maarjamäe makes clear that material memorials never simply speak for themselves and are, instead, multiple and contested in meaning. It also shows that if the tidiness of a memorial is the reminder of an obligation to remember, then its neglect can be but an invitation to forget, or to remember badly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]