CfA - Berlin Summer School in Social Sciences 2020

Linking Theory and Empirical Research

July 20 - 30 | 2020  Berlin

We are delighted to announce the 10th edition of the Berlin Summer School in Social Sciences. The summer school aims at supporting young researchers by strengthening their ability in linking theory and empirical research. The two-week program creates an excellent basis for the development of their current research designs.

In the first week, we address the key methodological challenges of concept-building, causation/explanation, and micro-macro linkage that occur in almost all research efforts. We strive for a clarification of the epistemological foundations underlying methodological paradigms. In the second week, these methodological considerations are applied to central empirical fields of research in political science, sociology, and other related disciplines. In this second part of the program, participants are assigned to four thematic groups according to their own research topic. The thematic areas covered are: "Global Governance & International Relations", "Citizenship, Migration, and Identities", "Social Struggle and Globalization", and "Democracy at the Crossroads".

The program is characterized by a varied format comprised of lectures, workshops, seminars, and a one-to-one consultation. During the summer school, participants will also have the opportunity to present and discuss their own work extensively. Participants will be provided with hands-on advice for their research designs.

The school brings together a faculty of renowned international and Berlin-based scholars. Among the confirmed international lecturers are Ann Swidler (UC Berkeley), David Stark (The University of Texas at Austin), Donatella della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore), Felix Berenskoetter (SOAS University of London), Hendrik Wagenaar (University of Sheffield) and Vera Troeger (University of Warwick).

The Berlin Summer School was co-funded by the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences (BGSS) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Details on the location and tuition fees can be found on our webpage www.berlinsummerschool.de.

The international summer school is open to up to 60 PhD candidates, advanced master students, and young postdocs. The call for applications is currently open. Applications can be submitted online via the application form on the summer school webpage until March 22, 2020.

The decisions of the selection committee will be announced to the applicants in April. If you have any further questions, please contact the organizing team at bgsssumm@hu-berlin.de.

Call for Session Organizers: "1^st RC33 Regional Conference – Africa: Botswana" and "SMUS Conference" in cooperation with ESA RN21 “Quantitative Methods”

March 15 – 21, 2021 | Gaborone, Botswana

The ISA Research Committee on “Logic and Methodology in Sociology” (RC33) together with the “Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability” (GCSMUS) and the Research Network “Quantitative Methods” (RN21) of the European Sociology Association” (ESA) will organize a “1^st RC33 Regional Conference – Africa: Botswana” which will at the same time be the “1^st International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability” (“SMUS Conference”) from Monday 15.03 – Sunday 21.03.2021, hosted by the University of Botswana in Gaborone, Botswana.

The seven-days conference aims at promoting a global dialogue on methods and should attract methodologists from all over the world and all social and spatial sciences (e.g. area studies, architecture, communication studies, educational sciences, geography, historical sciences, humanities, landscape planning, philosophy, psychology, sociology, urban design, urban planning, traffic planning and environmental planning).

If you are interested in organzing a session, please submit an abstract including session title and panel organizers (botswana2021@mes.tu-berlin.de) by 31.03.2020.

If you are interested in getting further information on the conference (such as Calls for Abstracts) and other GCSMUS activities, please subscribe to the GCSMUS newsletter by registering via the following website: https://lists.tu-berlin.de/mailman/listinfo/mes-smusnews or get in touch with Nina Baur nina.baur@tu-berlin.de

The Annual Conference of ESPAnet, the Network for European Social Policy

Analysis

September 2-4, 2020 | Leuven, Belgium

https://www.espanet2020.be

Second International Conference on Policy Diffusion and Development Cooperation

São Paulo, 25-27 May 2020

The Second International Conference on Policy Diffusion and Development Cooperation will take place in São Paulo, 25-27 May 2020. Paper submission to the panel “Beyond Coercion, Emulation, Competition and Learning: The Frontiers of Causal Mechanisms in Research on Social Policy Diffusion” is possible until 15 December 2019.

The panel welcomes both theoretical and empirical contributions that critically engage with diffusion mechanisms in research on social policy and that provide links for further theory development. The full description of the conference and our panel (= panel 6) can be found here: https://policydiffusion.com/icpddc-2020/

Paper proposals (max. 1000 words) need to be submitted through the conference website.

For any questions please contact Johanna Kuhlmann (johanna.kuhlmann@uni-bremen.de) and Amanda Shriwise (amanda.shriwise@uni-bremen.de).

More information:http://www.maltasociologicalassociation.com/2019/10/call-for-abstracts-exploring-postgender.html

Beyond inequality? Social security And Social Welfare between East and West”

17^th Annual Conference of the East Asian Social Policy Research Network & 27^th Annual Conference of the Foundation for International Studies on Social Security

26-28 June 2020, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

The idea of social investment has received much attention from policymakers and social policy analysts in East Asia, Western Europe and globally. At the same time, debates have been ongoing about whether the focus on human capital formation, labour market inclusion and empowerment can effectively alleviate contemporary social and economic inequalities. Several studies have found that the middle classes are often the primary beneficiaries of social investment, that successful policy packages are difficult to implement and transfer across jurisdictions and may be insufficient to address the impact of automation and the digitisation of our daily lives. 

Despite much social policy innovation in Hong Kong and elsewhere across East Asia, income inequality has continued to increase sharply since the 1997 East Asian and 2008 global financial crises. Efforts to reduce poverty and address rising income inequality in many European countries have stalled. The EU Social Investment Package aims to secure ‘more adequate and sustainable social policies through investing in people's skills and capabilities’ but has struggled to curb the variation of inequality levels and trends among its member states.

Against this background, in an exciting development, the 2020 annual conferences of the East Asian Social Policy Research Network (EASP) and Foundation for International Studies on Social Security (FISS) are joining together to examine ‘social security’ and ‘social welfare’ policies and to re-imagine the role of private and collective income transfer programmes in successfully alleviating contemporary social inequalities. New approaches to compare and contrast policy structures between East and West are warranted given the need to facilitate cross-regional policy learning in the context of migration and increasingly shared processes of technological, demographic, and economic change.

We particularly welcome theoretical or empirical contributions studying how specific social policy structures may produce effective complementarities with existing regional social investment paradigms. We equally encourage contributions with a comparative and global perspective, particularly those including both East Asian and Western cases. It is a long tradition of EASP and FISS to invite papers by postgraduate students and early-career researchers as well as established scholars working in the field of social welfare, social security, and social policy analysis.

Depending on the final selection of submitted papers and panels, the conference will comprise the following streams (as well as any other aspects of social policy in an Open Stream):

1:        Welfare States & Welfare Regimes
2:        Social Security & Social Justice
3:        Governance, Democracy & Participation
4:        Migration, Social Rights & Citizenship Stratification
5:        Population & Demographic Change
6:        Health & Human Well-being
7:        Economic & Social Inequalities
8:        Poverty & Social Inclusion
9:        Education & Vocational Training
10:      Ageing & Gerontechnology
11:      Labour Markets & Employment
12:      Housing & Urbanisation
13:      Gender Inequality & Work-Family Reconciliation
14:      Sustainability, Environmental Management & Social Security

Those wishing to present a paper should submit an abstract of between 200 and 300 words. Information enclosed with any abstract should include:stream number, title of paper; author name(s); affiliation(s); and email address of one corresponding author.

Those wishing to organise a panel should submit apanel proposal. Information enclosed with any panel proposal should include:title of panel; objective of panel (between 200 and 300 words); names and affiliations of all panel organiser(s) and participating members; along with abstracts of three or four papers (between 200 and 300 words each); an e-mail address of one corresponding panel organiser.

Submissions for the17^thannualEASP conference should be sent to easp2020hk@gmail.com. Submissions for theFISS 2020 Conference should be sent to fiss2020hk@gmail.com.
The deadline for abstracts and panel proposals is6 March 2020.
Further details about the conference programme and venue will be announced shortly. For any queries, please contact stefankuehner@LU.edu.hk or Julie.Janssens@uantwerpen.be.

Expert workshop ‘non-take-up and coverage’ of social benefits

11-13 March, Brussels (Belgium)

organized in the context of the InGRID-2 project, funded by the European Commission

The University of Antwerp and the Federal Public Service for Social Security (Belgium) are organizing an expert workshop on non-take-up and coverage of social security and social assistance benefits in developed welfare states. This workshop will bring together experts from academia and public administrations, to discuss new advances in research, best practices related to monitoring coverage and non-take-up, as well as innovative policies that aim to limit the (negative effects of) non-take-up of social benefits. We welcome both qualitative and quantitative research, as well as policy and field experiences.

Applicants are expected to present a research paper that is directly related to one of the topics mentioned below. Policy-makers and practitioners from public administrations can present a technical policy note rather than a research paper.

The expected contributions should cover at least one of the following themes:

•         The measurement and monitoring of non-take-up
•         Innovative research into the causes and consequences of non-take-up
•         Policy solutions to combat non-take-up
•         Measuring and conceptualizing coverage
•         Coverage of social policies in practice

Further information on this workshop including information on the application procedure can be found at http://www.inclusivegrowth.eu/expert-workshops/call-28-expert-workshop-ua .

The deadline for submissions is 8 January 2020. (Participation is free of charge and travel and accommodation will be (partially) reimbursed.)

International Research Conference Decent Care Work? Transnational Home Care Arrangements

May 27-29, 2020, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main/Germany

The ageing of industrialized societies in combination with the absence of an adequate (welfare) state response is engendering an alarming deficit in care work. This has paved the way for the commodification of care, formerly a typical case of feminized, reproductive work, carried out informally and unpaid within the family. This conference examines if and how a sea change concerning the commodification and formalization of elderly care work is gradually affecting the public understanding ofdecent workanddecent care.

We draw on the findings of a collaborative research project of transnationally operating care agencies, which recruit migrant live-in carers from Central and Eastern Europe for work in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The project has examined how agencies, care receivers and care givers negotiate their expectations regarding decent care and decent work in these transnational home care arrangements. It also includes the perspectives of stakeholders in the field, for example trade unions, associations, NGOs, care workers’ networks and activists, care workers’ stay-behind relatives and others.

The conference seeks to bring this study into dialogue with the findings of current international research. It offers new insights by bringing together researchers in the fields of migration, labor, gender, care markets as well as care workers’ organizations. By highlighting deficiencies in the economic, political and social regulation of elderly care work, it aims to shed light on the fundamental contradictions between decent care and decent work.

Four key areas will be addressed during the conference: (1)Transnational (1) Commodification, Marketization and Corporatization of Live-in Care(2)Expectations, Contradictions and Social Inequalities in Transnational Home Care Arrangements(3)Agency and (Self-) Organizing of Live-in Care Workers(4)Regularization of Transnational Care Work

This set of questions requires an interdisciplinary analysis. Therefore, the conference aims at bringing together researchers from a variety of disciplines including anthropology, gerontology, sociology, history, geography, socio-legal studies, gender and migration studies, labor and social/public policy studies.

Abstracts of 150 words are to be submitted through the ConfTool application at the following address: https://www.conftool.com/decent-care-work2020/ by Friday, January 31, 2020 at 11:59 p.m. (extended deadline). Participants will be notified of the Program Committee’s decision by early February 2020. Please select at least one of the above-mentioned key areas that best suits your submission.

We welcome proposals from researchers at all stages of their career. Please note that unfortunately we cannot cover expenses for travel and accommodation. The conference fee (€100 /reduced fee €60) also applies to accepted speakers.

If you have any questions, please contact decentcarework@soz.uni-frankfurt.de.

For more information see http://decent-care-work.net/en/conference/ 

The intersections of Economic Insecurity, Non-Standard Employment and Gender in Southern Europe

Call for Papers on the Open Access Journal “Frontiers in Sociology”

This call aims at collecting contributions that explore the relation between non-standard work and economic insecurity using an intersectional framework. We are interested in contributions that explore Southern Europe in a comparative or single country perspective. We welcome all approaches - theoretical and empirical, substantive and methodological, micro and macro, qualitative and quantitative, as well as geographically specific research.

The complete call and the information is available at https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/11866/the-intersections-of-economic-insecurity-non-standard-employment-and-gender-in-southern-europe

We welcome expression of interest at lara.maestripieri@gmail.com.

Global Dynamics of Social Policy series - Call for Proposals

SERIES EDITORS
Lorraine Frisina Doetter, Delia González de Reufels, Kerstin Martens and Marianne Ulriksen

ABOUT THE SERIES
This series welcomes studies on the waves, ruptures and transformative periods of welfare state expansion and retrenchment globally, that is, across nation states and the world as well as across history since the inception of the modern Western welfare state in the nineteenth century. It takes a comprehensive and globalized perspective on social policy, and the approach will help to locate and explain episodes of retrenchment, austerity, and tendencies toward dewelfarization in particular countries, policy areas and/or social risk-groups by reference to prior, simultaneous or anticipated episodes of expansion or contraction in other countries, areas, and risks. One of the aims of this series is to address the different constellations that emerge between political and economic actors including international and intergovernmental organizations, political actors and bodies, and business enterprises. A better understanding of these dynamics improves the reader’s grasp of social policy making, social policy outputs and ultimately the outcomes of social policy.

CONTACT FOR PROPOSALS