Welfare in question: understandings of social protection in Germany and Italy

The project takes welfare as a contested node around which different tensions converge. Acknowledging the increasing visibility of both migrants and far-right groups in the political landscape of (post)colonial Europe, the project aims at analyzing their experiences, imaginaries and practices “for” and “around” welfare, investigating how their grassroots activism differently addresses a universal demand for social protection. In so doing, we aim to shed light on a series of fundamental questions about deservingness, solidarity, and emerging images and relations to the nation-state(s). The project engages as well with the role, opinions and daily practices of social workers, as figures who administer institutional welfare and who sometimes could be affiliated to both groups. In so doing the novelty of the project consists in engaging with subjects 1) who are rarely considered in the literature on welfare, 2) whose views and experiences are not compared, 3) who often coexist in marginalized and economically underserved urban areas, defined here as urban borderlands. Drawing from empirical data collected through ethnographic methods in Italy and Germany, and specifically in four medium-sized cities, this project aims at developing a theoretical framework to explore welfare complexities and open up new research strands on welfare futures.