GSP Call for Papers

"Global Social Policy in a time of Pandemic"
 

Dear colleagues,

The Global Social Policy journal seeks submissions that provide new research and analysis on impacts and responses to Covid-19 from the perspective of global, transnational or regional social policies.

Moments of crisis – national, regional or global – often define the evolution of social policies. The unprecedented response to Covid-19 will undoubtedly be such a moment. A Special Issue of Global Social Policy is seeking submissions that provide new research and analysis on impacts and responses to Covid-19 from the perspective of global, transnational or regional social policies. The field of global social policy focuses on the transnational institutions and ideas that shape policies, as well as the policy responses to trends in globalisation. It provides the tools and frameworks for understanding and analysing policy responses; differentiated impacts whether geographically, by socio-economic status or identity; and the ways in which impacts, ideas and institutional responses spread through a highly globalised but also unequal international system.

 For this Special Issue, we are interested in papers that examine the roles of international institutions in shaping responses to Covid-19; in policies or institutional arrangements that shape how countries respond to the pandemic, and the implications particularly in contexts and communities where responses are less effective. Topics of interest can include the exchange of ideas, the flows of information, transnational flows of people and goods that support or hinder effective responses, and the differentiated impacts. Migrants, for instance, may be among the most vulnerable populations, but in many contexts are an essential resource in the care provisions necessary to meeting health and social care needs.

 The Special Issue is also interested in issues arising from the social and economic ‘lockdown’ and the fiscal and social policy responses as an expression of what governments can do in extraordinary times. How are ideas about social policy changing in the light of a global pandemic? Are changes implemented in such a moment likely to lead to longer term shifts in national policies or welfare regimes? How does a more globally integrated trade system respond to lockdown: what are the implications for essential goods and services including staple foods and medical equipment? And how do choices made in rich countries – closing borders, reducing ex-/imports - affect lives and livelihoods in low income countries?

 At the global level, the pandemic is playing out within a shifting balance of power, between states but also affecting key UN and international institutions, particularly the WHO. Competing trends can be identified - on the one hand, towards nationalism and protectionism, and on the other, a recognition of the imperative to support countries in need, given that any solution to a global pandemic will need to be global. The pandemic is likely to have significant consequences for the aid and development sectors, and for international organisations, potentially reshaping social protection instruments and priorities on a global scale.

 We encourage articles on these or other relevant topics, addressing but not limited to the following questions:

·      How might Covid19 as a truly global crisis restructure, reshape or challenge traditional social policies or welfare regimes?

·      What new policies or programmes are emerging? Are they likely to be temporary or is there a shift in ideas about the role of states or international organisations in enhancing security – and for whom; citizens; workers; migrants or others?

·      What role do provisions established since the global financial crisis, including the ILO’s Social Protection Floor, the Global Compacts on migration and refugees, the SDGs etc. play in responding to this pandemic?

·      What inequalities are being highlighted by the pandemic and policy responses? This includes access to resources, the provision of care, the carers – paid and unpaid, issues of gender and age, and the immediate versus longer term impacts such as the developmental and educational impacts on children.

·      What impacts are being seen, for example, on multilateralism, aid and development budgets, solidarity and global collective responsibility, regional dynamics or south-south cooperation. How does Covid19 amplify challenges of global regulatory frameworks or clashes between different ‘development’ goals, including the SDGs?

Deadline for expression of interest 12^th of June.

Read more here: journals.sagepub.com/home/gsp

Call for Papers

Catastrophes, Meanings, and Politics in a Global World:
Toward a Cultural Sociology of Disasters
Special Issue of Poetics

Poetics, a leading journal of sociology of culture, media, and the arts, is issuing a call for papers for a special issue in 2021. Dedicated to “Catastrophes, Meanings, and Politics in a Global World: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Disasters,” this special issue will be guest edited by Bin Xu, Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University and Ming-Cheng M. Lo, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis.

Natural and technological disasters not only cause chaos and casualties but also compel individual and collective actors to engage in making sense of profound life, death, and suffering. Such meaning-making processes inevitably involve clashes of multiple symbolic systems. While mainstream sociology of disaster has produced abundant and rigorous studies of social aspects of disasters, it has yet to develop a systematic research agenda centered on the cultural aspect of disasters. The overarching goal of this special issue is to explore and established how disasters are fundamentally cultural.

This special issue attempts to advance this agenda by making some new moves. First, this special issue seeks to address multiple dimensions of culture, including public discourses, symbolic practices, institutional cognitive schemata, individual interpretations, and so on. Second, this issue aims to enhance reflexive self-positioning by denaturalizing the lingering Euro-America-centric biases in our discipline. Finally, this issue aims to provide fecund grounds for the cross-fertilization of the sociology of disaster and cultural sociology.

We are looking for papers that advance this agenda through theoretically illuminating and empirically rigorous research. While we welcome various regional foci, topics, and perspectives, we are particularly interested in papers that address the following issues:

Disasters or related processes with global impacts

Disasters in the global South, especially Africa and Latin America

Long-term disasters such as climate change

Recent and historical pandemics such as the SARS, Ebola, and the ongoing COVID-19 outbreaks

Interested authors need to submit an abstract of about 500 words to the guest editors (Xu and Lo) by May 15, 2020. The guest editors will notify the authors with their decisions by June 1, 2020. The authors whose abstracts are accepted will need to submit the full papers to the guest editors first for internal reviews by September 1, 2020. After addressing the guest editors’ feedback, these authors will submit their revised papers to Poetics through its on-line submission system by December 1, 2020. These submissions will then be subject to the journal’s anonymous review process for additional revisions and the final editorial decisions.

Please feel free to circulate this call for papers. We are looking forward to reading your submission. Should you have any questions, feel free to email the guest editors Bin Xu (bin.xu@emory.edu) and Ming-Cheng M. Lo (mmlo@ucdavis.edu).

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).

For more information, please contact Dr Lars E. F. Johannessenlarsem@oslomet.noand seehttps://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/towards-resilient-nordic-welfare-states/nordic-espanet

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.

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/ 

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

Proposals can be sent to the series editors, or Palgrave editor Sharla Plant sharla.plant@palgrave.com.