This year’s Anthropology Day Welfare States in Crisis is organized in collaboration with the Crafting Resilience and Prototyping Welfare projects, two recently awarded research projects carried out by anthropologists from Leiden University.
Anouk de Koning, Martha Kapazoglou, and Vénicia Sananès (Leiden University/University of Amsterdam) will deliver the keynote address on the day. Here is their abstract!
Reimagining welfare futures as things fall apart
In Europe and beyond, welfare states are falling apart. In the face of volatile economies, growing precarity, and increasingly conflictual diversity, welfare states show themselves to be unable to live up to earlier social contracts, to sedimented sets of expectations and assumptions vis-à-vis the state. In this keynote, we examine how, in this context, welfare arrangements are being reimagined and remade. We focus on the work of imagination and refashioning done in state-sanctioned spaces and ask what future realities this prefigures.
After a general discussion of current predicaments and changing welfare landscapes in Europe, two dispatches from the field, from Thessaloniki and Amsterdam, illustrate the different stakes and imaginations that shape Europe’s welfare futures.
We invite you to join conversations about the current state and futures of welfare in and beyond Europe.
Wereldmuseum Leiden
May 17th 2024
10.00 – 18.30