The Collaborative Research Centre "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" is represented on X as well as on Mastodon. On these channels you will always find the latest news about the CRC 1342.

Furthermore, we also recommend the blog Social Policy Worldwide of the SOCIUM Research Center Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Bremen.

Dr. Armin Müller from project B05 "Inclusion and Benefit Dynamics in the Chinese Welfare Regime" was interviewed by WirtschaftsWoche. In the article "Altersvorsorge: Chinas Renten-Zeitbombe tickt" (paywall), he gives his expert opinion of how to deal with the ageing of Chinese society.

The article examines the financial sustainability of the Chinese pension system, which is precarious according to recent Chinese studies. In the People's Republic, similar to Western countries, there are debates about demographic change and an increase in the retirement age. The interview helped to contextualize the debate and shed light on important background information. For example, the retirement age is particularly low for women at 50 or 55. However, retired women often continue to play important social roles, such as looking after children, which enables the next generation of women to work full-time. Although raising the retirement age reduces the costs of contribution-financed pension insurance, it increases the need for childcare elsewhere. In addition, the system under discussion primarily covers employees in the formal urban sector. The vast majority of Chinese people do not benefit from a pension, which represents an independent livelihood, and is hardly considered in the discussion.

Samantha Grunow worked as a Student Assistant in project A04 "Global Developments in Health Care Systems" from July 2022 until May 2024. She studied International Relations at the University of Bremen from 2021 until 2024 and focused her studies on the role of humanitarian organizations and aid amidst crisis and instability. In this interview, she describes her work experience and gives tips to students who are interested in a SHK position.

What were your tasks in project A04?

My tasks mainly included identifying and downloading relevant health care legislation and then supporting the development and implementation of a codebook to annotate this legislation to create a plane of comparability concerning inclusivity and generosity of health care systems on an international level. Towards the end of my time with A04, my tasks were centralized in implementing the codebook as much as possible, so we could make use of my experience in the development phases.

Were there synergy effects between your studies and your work at the CRC 1342?

I studied International Relations with a focus on the role of humanitarian actors. I wrote my final thesis on health care accessibility and the efficacy of humanitarian aid in Somalia, a country that has lacked a functioning central government for over 40 years now. Because of the overlap between my research's concern for the lack of a health care system and the project's concern for the assessment of existing systems, I was grateful for the team’s input on my research, especially early on as I had never focused on health care accessibility or health care systems before.

The project's insight to existing systems and the situation in Somalia was beneficial to guide some of my decision-making about how to approach the situation and support my conclusions by offering comparisons. Simultaneously, as I worked with white papers and other documentation from Somalia, this also informed my opinions and suggestions through the implementation of project’s codebook. Now, despite my absence, I hope some of my conclusions may help the team navigate obstacles they encounter when trying to assess health care systems which have been influenced by the involvement of humanitarian aid over time.

What career step followed and what do you take with you from your time as a student assistant into your professional life?

I finished my thesis in the middle of May and am now eager to find a full time position which is impactful and fulfilling. Working with the A04 project has given me valuable research skills, but what I value the most is that, even as a student assistant, I was given meaningful tasks which played a large role in the trajectory of the project. I joined the group a bit nervous that I would not be able to offer a lot due to my lack of experience, but I am thankful for this experience and take from it a reminder that everyone has skills and strengths that can be highlighted to optimize the productivity and success of any team.

What advice would you like to give future student assistants?

I encourage you to not only get your hours in but voice your opinion and do not be afraid to make mistakes. Listen to everyone's stories and advice and you will learn a lot more from your experience than how to collect and analyze data. The A04 project gave me a place to truly grow. I learned more than I ever anticipated about project management, especially regarding methodology and analysis, but this is mostly because the team gave me and my opinions a place in conversation. I was not the assistant that did the busy work, but a team member who supported decision making and planning. Take advantage of this position and make the most of it, you will appreciate all of it later.

The 13th NordWel Summer School "State, Society & Citizen - Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Welfare State Development" will take place at the Haus der Wissenschaft in Bremen from 19 to 23 August 2024. On this website you will find the programme and further information about the Summer School.

As the last event of our CRC 1342 Jour Fixe lecture series in the summer semester, Sara Niedzwiecki from the University of California, Santa Cruz, gave a lecture on "Immigrants and the Welfare State in Latin America. Barriers to access" on June 19, 2024. The lecture was not only attended by numerous colleagues on site, but could also be followed via video conference format.

Abstract:

Countries in the Global South experienced a massive increase in immigration in the past decade, with more migrants ending up there than in the Global North. Within South America, over seven million Venezuelans have left their country since 2015, leading to an extraordinary scale of intraregional migration. During these same years, and due to the expansion of social programs, millions of citizens in the region accessed basic income and better-quality healthcare, many for the first time. This talk studies these dual trends and analyzes whether social policies effectively incorporate immigrants. Failing to provide newcomers with a basic standard of living produces social exclusion. It shows that immigrants have more impediments to accessing the welfare state than citizens, even for universal public health, but especially for targeted social assistance. This derives from a combination of political elites’ views around the degree to which immigrants “deserve” access to different types of policies. The research focuses on the barriers that immigrants face to accessing social policy in middle-income South American countries with high rates of immigration—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Barriers to access are measured through qualitative coding of social assistance, social pensions, and public healthcare that build on legal documents, information requests, and secondary literature from 1990 to 2023, and public officials’ views are measured through in-depth interviews. In analyzing barriers to accessing social policy, this study contributes to the literatures on comparative welfare states and immigration, as well as comparative social policy in middle income countries. 

Sara Niedzwiecki is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She studies social policy, subnational politics, and immigration in Latin America. Sara is the author of Uneven Social Policies: The Politics of Subnational Variation in Latin America (2018, Cambridge University Press), which was awarded LASA's Donna Lee Van Cott Book Award from The Political Institutions Section and the International Public Policy Association's IPPA Book Award. She also co-authored Measuring Regional Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2016). Sara has authored and co-authored articles in Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Latin American Politics and Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, Regional and Federal Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, International Political Science Review, among other peer-reviewed journals. During 2020-2021 academic year, Sara was a fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies where she worked on a new project on social policy and immigration in South America.

Website: saraniedzwiecki.com

Dr. Gulnaz Isabekova-Landau, postdoctoral researcher in the Collaborative Research Center project B06, which examines social policies in Eastern Europe, South Caucasus, and Central Asia, participates in the "Health in the Mountains Agenda" implemented by the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic with support from the World Health Organization (WHO).

The "Health in the Mountains Agenda" builds on the initiative of the President of the Kyrgyz Republic, championing 2023–2027 as the "Five Years of Action for the Development of Mountain Regions", which was endorsed at the 77^th session of the United Nations General Assembly.

The "Health in the Mountains Agenda" focuses on rural health equity in mountainous areas of the country, cross-sectoral work on the determinants of health, and the role of gender equality and women’s empowerment in ensuring a strong rural health workforce and addressing health determinants. Dr. Gulnaz Isabekova-Landau is involved in the preparatory research targeting these areas and supporting a proposed policy dialogue, which is expected to include national authorities in the health sector, civil society organizations, multilateral system partners, and research institutes. Her role in this initiative builds on her years of experience researching healthcare systems and access to healthcare in Eastern Europe, South Caucasus, and Central Asia, as well as her recently published book on the sustainability of health aid to the Kyrgyz Republic.

Publications

Isabekova, G. (2024). Stakeholder Relationships and Sustainability. The Case of Health Aid to the Kyrgyz Republic. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-3-031-31990-7 Add to Citavi project by ISBN.

Isabekova, G. (2020). Mutual learning on the local level: The Swiss Red Cross and the Village Health Committees in the Kyrgyz Republic. Global Social Policy 21(1), 117-137.

Isabekova, G. and Pleines, H. (2020). Integrating development aid into social policy: Lessons on cooperation and its challenges learned from the example of health care in Kyrgyzstan. Social Policy & Administration, online first.

Isabekova, G. (2019). The Contribution of Vulnerability of Labour Migrants to Drug Resistance in the Region: Overview and Suggestions. European Journal of Development Research 31, 620-642.

This year's retreat of the Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen took place on the premises of the "Integrierter Gesundheitscampus" (IGB) [https://www.gesundheitscampusbremen.de/] on Friday, June 7, 2024. All members came together in the heart of Bremen's city centre to exchange ideas personally and professionally away from daily business.

All 15 projects of the CRC 1342 presented project-related news, current research results and publications as well as "work in progress" from 9 am to 5 pm. In the discussions that followed, the other colleagues provided relevant feedback from their specialist perspectives and different expertise.

Agenda:
09.00-10.00: Projects A02-A04
10.00-10.30: Coffee Break
10.30-12.00: Projects A05-B01
12.00-13.30: Lunch Break
13.30-15.00: Projects B04-B09
15.00-15.30: Coffee Break
15.30-17.00: Projects B10-B12
17.00: Get-together

Prof. Irene Dingeldey and Prof. Ulrich Mückenberger – both PIs of project A03: Worlds of Labour: Coverage and Generosity of Employment Law – received the "Top Cited Article"-Award of Wiley Publisher for the years 2022 and 2023. The article "Worldwide patterns of legal segmentation in employment law" is the scientific introduction of the special issue of the International Labour Review "Overcoming Legal Segmentation: Extending legal Rules to All Workers?" (February 2022).

ILO labour law through transnational social dialogues

Furthermore, the scientific volume dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has now been published by the prestigious Sorbonne publisher. It contains a chapter on the production of international labour norms via transnational social dialogues written by Ulrich Mückenberger.

Les dialogues sociaux transnationaux comme leviers des normes mondiales du travail, in: Dhermy-Mairal, Marine, Kott, Sandrine, Lespinet-Moret, Isabelle and Louis, Marieke (eds.) (2024): Mondialisation et justice sociale. Un siècle d’action de l’Organisation internationale du travail, Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, chapter 17.

On May 22, 2024, Prof. Marvin Suesse from Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) presented the central aspects and five case studies of his current monograph "The Nationalist Dilemma: A Global History of Economic Nationalism", published by Cambridge University Press. As part of the Jour Fixe series, the lecture was well attended not only by numerous colleagues from the University of Bremen and the CRC 1342, but also by many students from various faculties and study programs.

Publication:

Suesse, Marvin (2023): The Nationalist Dilemma: A Global History of Economic Nationalism, Cambridge University Press.

Abstract:

The Doctoral Researcher in the team of the Information Management Project (INF) wrote a cumulative dissertation titled "Multimodal and Collaborative Interaction for Visual Data Exploration". Gabriela obtained her PhD ("Dr.-Ing.") from the Faculty of Mathematics/Computer Science (FB 03) with a "summa cum laude".

Gabriela Molina León is a computer scientist and visualization researcher. Her thesis contributed to the CS fields of data visualization, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work. In her dissertation, she investigated how different interaction modalities and devices can support data experts to visually explore and make sense of data, individually and collaboratively. Through a series of empirical studies applying mixed methods, Gabriela studied how experts interact and wish to interact with spatio-temporal data on tablets and large vertical displays at the workplace. Furthermore, she worked closely with social science researchers to support them in their work. They served as an example of real-world experts who interact with data in their everyday jobs.

The dissertation research was conducted partly during the first and second phases of the CRC 1342. Gabriela is one of the researchers who led the design and development of WeSIS. Accordingly, the first paper of her dissertation presented the lessons learned from the co-creation workshops conducted as part of the A01 project. Three of the four papers involved experiments that included social science researchers of the CRC as participants.

Gabriela Molina León was co-supervised by Prof. Dr. Andreas Breiter and Dr. Petra Isenberg (INRIA, France). As part of her research, she had a research stay in Paris, France, last year, which was co-financed by the CRC 1342 and the DAAD.