During the summer of 2024, several partners of Involve were active at various conferences. An overview. We start with Jean-Michel Bonvin, responsible for the theoretical foundation, then we let Lorraine have the floor. She elaborates on social policy. Our Irish partners, Daniel Hoey and Laurie O’Donnell, were active around homelessness,and Silke Goubin, responsible for the survey, presented the first results.
Jean-Michel Bonvin gave a keynote at the National Conference Against Poverty last August. To understand poverty, he went beyond the traditional monetary or material definition of poverty.
Someone living in poverty, according to Jean-Michel Bonvin, is someone who is not truly free to live a life that is valuable to them.
People living in poverty are not only people who need to be protected, but also people who are active in their own lives, capable of developing their own projects, taking part in the community, contributing to it, and so on.
Poverty thus includes all the factors that impede this real freedom to lead a life of value.
This expanded definition takes into account the total person and their environment.
This is how Jean-Michel Bonvin concretises the Receiver/Doer/Judge theory that Involve explores and applies.
More on (in French)
https://www.contre-la-pauvrete.ch/conference2024/translate-to-franzoesisch-dokumentation
SSA Congress 2024, From September 9 to 11, 2024, the Swiss Sociological Association (SSA) 2024 Congress was be held in Basel
Prof. Dr. Jean-Michel Bonvin gave keynote about “Accounting for the ambivalence of the politics of vulnerability: a perspective oriented towards capability to aspire and capability for voice”
More on Keynotes | SGS Kongress 2024 (fhnw.ch)
The British sociological association conference was held in Glasgow from 3-5 July 2024. Doctor Doreen Grimes attended the conference on behalf of the INVOLVE project.
Doreen presented a paper titled: A critical co-produced analysis of social policy in Europe: The Receiver Doer Judge (RDJ) Critical Policy Analysis Framework: An analysis of housing policy in Ireland. The paper outlined the receiver, Doer, Judge framework, the critical analysis policy grid designed for the project and provided a critical analysis of the housing for all policy in Ireland.
Daniel Hoey and Laurie O’Donnell, IE: The Value of the PAHRCA Methodology in Engaging People with Experience of Homelessness in a Long-term Research Project
Recruiting and retaining research participants living in conditions of vulnerability requires a comprehensive strategy to overcome multiple barriers. PAHRCA (Participatory Action Research: a Human Rights and Capability Approach) is a research methodological framework that brings together participatory, human rights and capability theory to meaningfully engage vulnerable people in long-term research projects. The aim of the methodology is to bring together academics and NGOs to empower marginalised people to consider and challenge the structures that cause their marginalisation and to participate in the co-construction of knowledge as co-researchers. As part of an EU-Horizon 2020 funded project INVOLVE, Focus Ireland is using the PAHRCA framework to conduct research with lone parents with experiences of homelessness to explore their experiences of using public services and to develop recommendations to improve them. Using the approach, the project has successfully engaged sixteen parents with experience of homelessness. The project began with an extended period of trust-building which led to each parent participating in two semi-structured qualitative interviews to explore their life story and experience of public services.
Following the interviews, several group sessions took place to critically reflect on key themes arising from the interviews, and to build knowledge and capacity for future phases of creative inquiry, data gathering and analysis, and the development of recommendations. This paper documents the experiences of using the PAHRCA method and describes the important practical steps and considerations, and the creative methods employed, to engage, recruit,
retain, and collaborate with people with experience of homelessness in a long-term research project.
They held a similar presentation during
Unesco Child and Family 11th Biennial International Conference in June 2024.
At this conference they were joined by a participant of involve, Melissa (and her daughter!). See picture.
Silke Goubin from KULeuven (Hiva) was in the USA presenting her work about political participation of vulnerable groups at the APSA, American Political Science Association 2024 conference.
In most liberal democracies, high levels economic inequality persist. And yet, there is no systematic evidence that inequality leads to redistributive policies or public demands for such policies. This leads to a paradox: Most citizens realize that inequality exists and is undesirable, while at first sight, little is done about it. To understand this paradox, this study outlines two perspectives by leveraging original experimental evidence of 8 European countries. When faced with high and rising inequality, do citizens indeed connect this to support for redistributive policies? We build up on theory which suggests that citizens have distinct preferences regarding social policies which redistribute to the poor, versus those that take from the rich. The first experiment introduces a conjoint analysis, probing respondents to make trade-offs between various redistributive policies to tackle inequality. This allows us to examine if citizens logically connect concerns about inequality with support for inequality-reducing policies. Second, we further examine fairness concerns regarding the rich. In a second experiment, respondents are presented with survey vignettes that vary the causes of inequality. This experiment aims to gauge if citizens update their redistributive preferences based on different causal attributions of wealth. Results from pilot data suggest that citizens indeed couple inequality with support for inequality-reducing policies, but only when they deem inequality to be ‘unfair’. For example, citizens only support taxing the rich if their wealth was created through favourable public policies.