Join Social Policy and Society for the 5th Annual Meeting and Lecture on Friday 17th June at 10am-12pm BST.

This event will include the journal's Annual Lecture: this year's speaker will be Fiona Williams, with her lecture entitled 'Aligning arguments for sustainable welfare with care and racial justice', which touches on Fiona's recent work with co-author Coretta Phillips, in the January 2022 special issue of Social Policy and Society.

Three of the most significant areas of change and contestation since the Beveridge Report eighty years ago are gender justice, climate change, and racial justice. All have profound implications for transforming welfare states, crystallised recently by the global pandemic. I have argued (Williams, 2021) that not only are these sites of major global crises – of care, the environment, and the racialisation of borders – but also that they are deeply interconnected. An understanding of their intersections is vital for social policy analysis and for articulating political strategies and alliances for change. Increasingly social policy arguments for sustainable welfare have identified synergies between the ethics of care and strategies for de-growth eco-welfare. These are important, but far less explored are the intersections between racial and environmental justice and what these mean for transforming welfare states.

This lecture will explore these issues; it will offer a way of framing the intersections across the political ethics of care, sustainability, and decoloniality in order to rethink the moral obligations of welfare states, and the political and policy consequences of these.

Everyone is welcome but registration is essential, so please register now.