In this workshop, we want to address this side of rural politics and comparatively analyze the dynamics of rural representation in African and European countries. We understand representation in both senses of the term. On one side, we take a look at the formal and institutional side of interest politics: which organizations dominate in interest politics? What relations to farmers’ and peasants’ associations have with political parties, parliaments and governments? How many farmers do they represent, and what are the agrarian and rural development policy goals they strive for? On the other side, we investigate the dominant countryside and rural life imaginaries that are produced in the everyday politics of representation. Which competing visions of agriculture, rural community and human-nature relations exist and are used in political discourse? What potential of romanticization exists in the respective debates? Finally, which rural groups are represented in these diverse imaginaries, and which are not?

Programme with schedule (Download)

The Summer School is organised by the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1342 “Global Dynamics of Social Policy” (University of Bremen).

Welfare states can be studied with a number of theoretical and methodological approaches, from various chronological perspectives and with a focus on different empirical phenomena and localities. The NordWel summer school aims to stimulate discussions across disciplines and foster innovative cross-disciplinary research on the development of welfare states over time and in a global context. The summer school brings together PhD students and well-established international scholars in scientific exchange.

We invite PhD students from different disciplinary backgrounds to participate in the discussion on the development of welfare states, their preconditions, present status, and how we ought to study them. PhD students present their papers in parallel sessions and get feedback from senior scholars and junior colleagues.

Keynote speakers and discussants include Daniel Béland (McGill University), Patrick Emmenegger (University of St. Gallen), Alexandra Kaasch (University of Bielefeld), Marianne Ulriksen (University of Southern Denmark), Carina Schmitt (University of Bamberg), Klaus Petersen (University of Southern Denmark), Pauli Kettunen (University of Helsinki) and Åsa Lundqvist (Lund University) and Herbert Obinger (University of Bremen).

PEW offers a platform to discuss early/unpublished papers that investigate the political economy, broadly construed, of social policy and inequality, with the ambition to bring together researchers at the SOCIUM and beyond, across methodological divides and with varying levels of experience.

The workshop format is as follows: Authors briefly introduce the background of the paper (1-2 minutes), a discussant shortly summarizes the paper and provides feedback (10-15 minutes), and subsequently we open to the audience. Papers are circulated one week in advance.

And most importantly, everyone is warmly welcome to attend!

You can sign up here for our mailing list.

Vor fünfzig Jahren beschlossen die Vereinten Nationen eine radikale Reform der globalen Wirtschaftsordnung. Die »New International Economic Order« (NIEO) war der erste alternative Globalisierungsentwurf: ein Projekt zur Überwindung kolonialer Wirtschaftsstrukturen zwischen dem Globalen Süden und dem Globalen Norden. Damals verhinderten reiche Industriestaaten die Umsetzung dieses Reformprogramms.

Angesichts globaler Armut, der Klimakatastrophe, zunehmender internationaler Konflikte und der Krise des Kapitalismus untersucht der Band „Eine gerechte Weltwirtschaftsordnung? Die »New International Economic Order« und die Zukunft der Süd-Nord-Beziehungen“ (Transcript 2024) die anhaltende Relevanz der NIEO – und zeigt Wege zu einer radikalen Transformation der Weltwirtschaft auf.

Ein Abend mit den Herausgebern Daniel Fuchs (Humboldt-Universität Berlin) und Alex Veit (Table.Media Berlin), dem Autor Roy Karadag (Universität Bremen), moderiert von Samia Mohammed (Universität Bremen).

PEW offers a platform to discuss early/unpublished papers that investigate the political economy, broadly construed, of social policy and inequality, with the ambition to bring together researchers at the SOCIUM and beyond, across methodological divides and with varying levels of experience.

The workshop format is as follows: Authors briefly introduce the background of the paper (1-2 minutes), a discussant shortly summarizes the paper and provides feedback (10-15 minutes), and subsequently we open to the audience. Papers are circulated one week in advance.

And most importantly, everyone is warmly welcome to attend!

You can sign up here for our mailing list.

Since its colonization, inequality has been one of Latin America’s (LA) defining characteristics. The social psychology of economic inequality is an emerging field that covers how income disparities shape people's thoughts about interpersonal relations. In this talk, I will present evidence from two studies. First, we use 13 waves from 18 Latin American countries over 23 years (above 250,000 participants) to examine the association between structural inequality and fairness evaluations with political and social trust. Multilevel regression analyses for comparative longitudinal surveys suggest that within-country changes in economic inequality over time are negatively related to political and social trust. However, between-country inequality was negatively associated with social trust but not to political trust. In addition, fairness evaluations of inequality were positively associated with social and political trust. Exploratory analyses revealed that fairness evaluations mediated the negative association between economic inequality and political and social trust. Second, we tested whether justice evaluations in LA were related to countries’ objective inequality and people’s ideological differences. We showed that most people in LA evaluate income distribution as unfair, which has not changed meaningfully over the years. However, the region cannot be characterized into a single story. Regardless of people’s similarities, each country has its history, reflecting different societies and worldviews. The results confirm that evaluating the distribution of economic resources is sensitive to the context’s social characteristics. Furthermore, we showed that ideological beliefs shaped distributive unfairness evaluations beyond structural and situational variables. We discussed how subjective elements, such unfairness evaluations of economic resources, play a decisive role in evaluating social reality and mobilizing people to pursue social change.