Our latest consortium meeting was hosted by Professor Margarita León and her team at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Institute of Government and Public Policies, on 13-14 June. All the Consortium Members attended this face-to-face meeting.

Professor Fiona Williams, scientific advisor to the EUROSHIP project, gave a keynote on intersectionality, poverty and exclusion. Her presentation provided an introduction to the discussions about our data and data analysis. In EUROSHIP our focus on intersectionality is one of several features that make our work stand out from the crowd in comparative social policy. One challenge is to understand the wider structural forces that contributes to intersectional inequalities. To frame poverty as a matter of “vulnerabilities” runs the risk of under-communicating the structural component of poverty. Arguably a focus on categorical inequalities or disadvantages may help us to avoid this risk. On the one hand we want to recognize the diversity in experiences and among disadvantaged population groups and the reasons for experiences of poverty, associated with gender, ethnicity/‘race’ and disability. On the other, we want to avoid a reduction of the analyses to a focus on the local and subjective experiences.  

The meeting provided an opportunity to discuss the progress of the project and to prepare for the last year of the project period.

Of the many upcoming joint dissemination activities in EUROSHIP, the first one will be the ESPAnet conference i Vienna in September. Our team members are organizing four of the sessions: on the digitalization of welfare services, the politics of minimum income protection, family policy, new concepts in welfare policy research, and green transitions.