Join the Social Policy and Society Editors for the sixth annual meeting and lecture from the journal, on Friday 9th June 2023 at 9.30am.
Guest speaker Fiona Dukelow will be giving this year’s lecture on ‘Welfare stigma, the work ethic and the welfare state: challenging and re-imagining the welfare-work nexus’.
Register for this online meeting and lecture here (Zoom).
Lecture Overview
Welfare stigma has become an increasingly pervasive feature of many welfare states. It looms large as a means of governing welfare recipiency and in shaping the lived experience of claiming welfare as a struggle with shame. Central to this is the relationship between work, the work ethic and welfare.
Focusing on this relationship, this lecture seeks to make connections between rather discrete compartments of contemporary social policy analysis. It reflects on the boundaries and norms between work and welfare in how the welfare state has evolved and explores the ways in which, under the political, economic and moral dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, market values dominate generating coercive and classificatory practices that discredit all else.
Turning to the burgeoning interest in and the mounting imperative of eco-social policy and sustainable welfare, I look at how this offers resources for re-imagining the boundaries between work and welfare and thus for challenging welfare stigma, and what this might imply for policy.