Join Our SASE Mini-Conference!

Together with Jeanne Lazarus and Daniel Mertens, I am organizing a mini-conference on The Welfare State in Financial Times for the 2020 SASE conference in Amsterdam (July 18-20). Paper abstracts can be submitted from November 25, 2019 until January 10, 2020.

In this mini-conference, we hope to explore the complicated new ways in which social and financial policies have become entangled in contemporary welfare states. Particularly, we are interested in the question of how processes of financialization are shaping welfare state development. On the one hand, the contributions to the mini-conference would map the ongoing financialization of the welfare state in contemporary political economies, both historically and comparatively, by focusing on the introduction and expansion of financial tools and mechanisms in public and private welfare provision. On the other hand, we welcome contributions that study how welfare states and other social groupings have debated and introduced new public policies and financial tools that promise to protect against growing financial risks in everyday life. Looking at these promises of protections through the market requires a fundamentally different understanding of the nature of the welfare state than the scholarship’s traditional focus on decommodification.

This mini-conference has several aims. First, we hope to reintegrate scholarship on welfare and finance to come to a better understanding of how the welfare state and the financial system are mutually intertwined, both historically and comparatively. Second, we hope to approach the mini-conference theme using a broader conception of finance: to include not just financial actors and their interest organizations, but also financial ideas and narratives, norms and practices that interact at different scales of the modern polity. Third, we would like to reflect on how the use of financial tools can be considered as a tool to protect household living standards and economic stability. Finally, we hope our mini-conference forms the basis of new conceptualization of welfare state development under financialized capitalism.

We welcome papers with varied disciplinary backgrounds discussing the following issues:

• Variations of finance-welfare interactions across political economies and over time;
• Lineages and linkages of institutional/ideational change in social policy areas and financial systems;
• State experiments with financial and technological innovations to fund and manage welfare programs;
• Political coalitions undergirding or confronting the welfare-finance nexus;
• The distributional and political effects of financial market-based social policies, particularly on class, gender, and race;
• The relationship between financialization and contemporary paradigms of social policy analysis such as marketization, privatization and social investment;
• Histories and narratives on the mutually constitutive nature of the financial system and the welfare state;
• Conceptual and methodological discussions that offer new research strategies to study financialization within the welfare state.

More details can be found on the SASE website (scroll all the way down for our mini-conference).