CfP Social Inclusion, 2021

Title:
Transnational Social Protection: Inclusion for Whom? Theoretical Reflections and Migrant Experiences

Information:
During the past decades, welfare institutions in Europe and in other regions of the world have become the main pillar for the articulation of citizenship, and thus one of the essential mediums of social inclusion and exclusion. Although the linkages between migration, welfare and belonging are not a new phenomenon, their current transformations require new ways of analysing the so-called liberal paradox. Empirically speaking, we are confronted with a large variety of mobilities and migratory movements—e.g., temporary and circular patterns, cross-border lifestyles of many settled movers. The increasingly transnational quality of migration and mobility across Europe and other regions of the world has also contributed to the emergence of various forms of cross-border social membership. The latter manifest themselves in the form of phenomena such as migrants’ simultaneous use of social security arrangements in their sending and receiving countries. If welfare institutions assume responsibility for migration management and, in doing so, influence the production of differentiated life chances, then closer analysis of the social stratifications is of great importance.
This thematic issue invites articles that address the changing relationships between social protection, cross-border migrations and social membership in Europe and beyond. We ask: What are the best conceptual tools (theoretically and methodologically-speaking) to address social security governance and social protection arrangements in the context of cross-border migration?
We also invite contributions concerned with the ways in which mobile individuals organize their formal and informal social protection vis-à-vis relevant institutional opportunity structures. In particular, we invite contributions on movers’ concrete experiences of global, transnational and national social security/social membership and what experiences they have of inequalities in welfare opportunities. Articles may also address the symbolic horizons that sustain, and/or contest any forms of social protection and social membership, including debates about “social tourism.”