Risks, Resources and Inequalities: Increasing Resilience in European Families: new project under LabFam umbrella
We’re happy to welcome another project under LabFam umbrella!
This time we’re about to start our Horizon Europe experience, along with
University of Oxford, COFACE Families Europe, KU Leuven, Stockholm University, University Autonomous of Barcelona and University of Zagreb.
The problem that rEUsilience tackles is of lack of adaptive capacities or resilience (understood from a familial rather than individual perspective) and resulting dilemmas and inequalities. The context is one of fast-paced changes in labour markets and income security to which families have to act as key responsive entities, cushioning potentially negative impacts and enabling/disabling risk-taking and change. In focusing especially on families that may not be able to respond and understanding the conditions that make for familial resilience more generally, the project answers 2 research questions:
What challenges and difficulties are created or exacerbated for families by labour markets in the ‘new world of work’ and how do families try to overcome these?
How do social policies contribute to familial resilience especially in terms of the extent to which they are inclusive, flexible and complementary?
To answer these questions rEUsilience looks at what different families actually do in situations calling for adaptiveness (e.g., need to change labour supply, need to manage or reorganise care, need to change gender and/or generational arrangements, need to engage in training or other activities to garner additional resources) and identifies perceived trade-offs in the context of families’ relations, commitments and different resource levels (broadly conceived). The project places this in a societal and policy context through both pan-European analyses of existing data (on policy and practice) and new focus group research in 6 quite different welfare states (BE, ES, HR, PL, SE, UK). Taken as a whole, the project’s research will identify the level of risk and socio-economic insecurity faced by families across Europe and the relative capacity of different family types to absorb socio-economic shocks by adjusting behaviours and structural arrangements and it will critically examine the role of policy as a contributory factor to related processes and outcomes.
Stay tuned!