WORKPACKAGES

This Workpackage includes organizing meetings and content as well as financial reporting of the project, accounting, scientific quality control, and project progress monitoring with respect to timelines and deliverables, financial issues, producing and maintaining the internal communications and information. It also includes communicating with the European Commission, as well as organising conferences and the activities of the Scientific Advisory Board and the Stakeholders’ Advisory Committee. Workpackage 1 is led by the German partner, the Institut fur Arbeitsmarkt und Berufsforschung (Institute for Employment Research, IAB).

Workpackage 2 will produce a state-of-the-art report on households’ resilience under conditions of socio-economic crisis in Europe. Its main tasks are to collect and critically assess existing research on resilient households, on crisis impacts at national, local and household levels, and to compile and interpret general findings on everyday living conditions in European households from an interdisciplinary point of view. This will serve as a basis for developing interpretations and hypotheses, as well as sharpening analytical concepts and empirical tools for the subsequent Workpackages of RESCuE. The work to be done will follow the thematic structure of Workpackages 4-11. It is led by the Lisbon University Institute’s Centre for Research in Sociology (ISCTE-IUL) in Portugal.

Workpackage 3, comprises all the fieldwork for the project and its methodological preparations, on which Workpackages 4-14 will draw: participant observations, flexibly guided expert interviews, narrative interviews with resilient households, the collection of visual (photographic) material produced by the interviewees, and further narrative interviews using those photographs as stimuli, according to the principles of photographic elicitation. Recorded, transcribed and partially translated narratives and especially the photographs serve not only as material for empirical analysis, but also as raw material for a web-based virtual exhibition and a downloadable slide show to be developed as part of the dissemination activities. Workpackage 3 is led by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) in Spain. Subsequently, a series of analytical Workpackages will be undertaken in parallel, all of them based on the empirical data collected in Workpackage 3.

Workpackage 4 will analyse the socio-economic practices of resilient households, which create, use or mobilise their resources for everyday life within certain social frames, networks and socio-economic contexts. This involves understanding strategies of coping and adaption in a socio-economic sense. Practices may include any kind of formal, informal or non-market based economic activities, from gift giving and the social exchange of goods and services to subsistence practices of production like gardening, herding, hunting, foraging, small-scale agriculture, and formal and informal labour. It may also include consumption patterns like recycling, re-using, saving, and it is strongly connected to cultural practices, the focus of Workpackage 5. Workpackage 4 is led by the University of Hertfordshire (UH), in the UK.

Downloads:

• Summary on resilient socio-economic practices
• Typology of socio-economic practices of resilience

Workpackage 5 examines the cultural practices of resilient households and their relations to socio-economic activities, such as gaining an education, participating in religious activities, and consuming or coproducing organised cultural activities. This Workpackage investigates the cultural practices of the investigated individuals and households, which may have socio-economic outcomes. This includes religious or traditional cultural activities, knowledge acquisition and transfer. But it also includes participating passively in ‘high’, ‘official’ or informal, class-, folk-, group- or subculture-related cultural practices. It is important to note that human practices of any kind are embedded in cultural settings and conditional frameworks, and this applies to economic practices as well. The aim of Workpackage 5 is to identify and analyse the aspects of culture and their influence on resilience, either directly, through socio-economic side outcomes, or as the settings embedding and enabling socio-economic practices which contribute to buffering hardship. This Workpackage is led by the University of Silesia in Katowice (US), in Poland.

Resilience does not appear by accident or through biological disposition, but is acquired or lost in biographical and other longitudinal psycho-social processes in which family and other close relations play a crucial role. This Workpackage will develop a longitudinal and biographical understanding of resilience in families and households by focusing on trajectories of adaptation, coping and resistance over time, and by examining how household resilience to the crisis varies according to family life stage. It examines similarities and differences in everyday patterns of resilience across family life transitions and stages, in different socio-economic and institutional contexts, across the case study countries and regions. This Workpackage is led by the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM), in Ireland.

Workpackage 7 looks at spatial aspects of households’ resilience. In it, a comparative perspective on rural and urban settings and their impact on resilience will be developed in each country and at the European level. This Workpackage refers back to a long tradition of considering social inequality in spatial settings but also recognises that specific spatial settings can provide resources (such as social relations, economic settings or natural resources). The selection of case studies in the fieldwork is highly relevant in this context because case study locations will include a range of different spatial settings including metropolitan (capital) areas, shrinking cities, de-industrialised provincial towns and remote agricultural areas, and even subarctic hunter/gatherer/herding zones. Given those extreme contrasts in the case studies, RESCuE’s interdisciplinary perspective is particularly important, bringing together ethnographic and anthropological methodology with the analytical methods used in economic and cultural geography. This Workpackage is led by the Middle Eastern Technical University of Ankara (METU), in Turkey.

Workpackage 8 investigates community aspects of resilience in the recognition that households, families and individuals are embedded in the wider social relations of communities. Those communities, whether they are institutionalised through the state or self-organised, voluntarily chosen or obligatory, formal or informal, play a crucial role in how European citizens live and interact with one another. Moreover, they are key areas for engagement and participation in civil society, through which citizens can collectively influence their living conditions. RESCuE believes that community relations and self-organisation must be seen as key elements of life, economic, social and cultural activities and therefore of political, social and cultural participation. Enabling participation is also a key challenge for European welfare states, in many of which basic support is seen as a civil right alongside cultural and social participation. The analysis carried out in this Workpackage will be based on the fieldwork done in Workpackage 3, and there are also interfaces with Workpackages 7, 9 and 10, where communities may be integrally linked with spatial questions, local welfare state activities and social economy developments. This Workpackage is led by Universidad Compluitense de Madrid (UCM), in Spain.

Workpackage 9 focuses on interactions of households with welfare state institutions, which may be enabling, obstructive or neutral to the development of resilience. It will look in particular at how members of resilient households interact with welfare state institutions and their supportive or restrictive practices. Several studies show that unemployed persons and welfare clients develop different coping strategies or social patterns of interpretation when they interact with bureaucratic welfare institutions, which also may include decisions on whether to claim benefits if the rejection of such claims, negative treatment or side effects are anticipated, and decisions on alternative survival strategies, successful or not. NGOs and their actions (also of relevance for Workpackage 10) are also important for this Workpackage, but this varies markedly between countries. Some of the partner countries provide basic social services where the welfare state has retreated or never been, whilst in other countries NGOs supplement the state system or care for those who have dropped out of view of the welfare state. Some NGOs which operate informally ‘below the radar’ of state institutions, may in some contexts be able to stay in contact with non-claimants of state benefits, a group (whose resilient strategies are of particular interest. This Workpackage is led by Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (UPSPS), in Greece.

Workpackage 10 analyses the different roles of Third Sector Organisations and the social economy in relation to resilient households. Local communities are influenced and respond to the activities of a range of different organisations, including NGOs, through the social economy and social entrepreneurship. This Workpackage will address questions like: What enables organisations like social enterprises to take root in a given community? How has the crisis and the subsequent austerity policies affected the activities of social entrepreneurs and the social economy, given that they do not only depend on community and citizens’ resources but also on state support in different ways? And how do these developments enable households to benefit with respect to opportunities to develop or maintain resilience? This Workpackage is led by the University of Silesia Katowice (US), in Poland.

Workpackage 11 looks in particular on the influences of gender, ethnicity and migration on household vulnerability and resilience, an important priority for the RESCuE project. Poverty, (intra-family) divisions of labour, labour force participation, living conditions, socio-economic and cultural practices and various resources including access to supportive structures and institutions are all strongly gendered. They are all also strongly shaped by ethnicity and put under new pressures by migration. The financial crisis, the rising cost of living and the upheavals accompanying migration all create new stresses which have the potential to change the dynamics of gendered and racialised social relations. Gender, ethnicity and migration may be sources of disadvantage, discrimination and exclusion, but may also be seen as diversities which enhance the scope of resources and practices contributing to resilience. This Workpackage is led by the Greek partner Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (UPSPS), in Greece.

Workpackage 12 will synthesise the results of the analysis and reporting carried out in Workpackages 4-11 and organise and prepare them for wider use and dissemination to scientific audiences. Workpackage 12 is led by IAB, in Germany.

In parallel with Workpackages 12, Workpackage 13 will distil the results of Workpackages 4-11 for their relevance to policymakers and develop policy recommendations to be disseminated to policy stakeholders, in consultation with the Stakeholders’ Advisory Committee. Workpackage 13 is led by the University of Lapland (LAY), in Finland.

Workpackage 14 will complement the work of Workpackages 12 and 13 by disseminating the results to the general public. This will be carried out throughout the life of the project, as relevant results are produced, and will include dissemination through digital social media (www.twitter.com/rescueresearch) as well as more traditional methods, such as press releases. RESCuE will have a public website (www.rescueproject.net), blogs and a web-based virtual exhibition with photographs and excerpts from interviews from the RESCuE fieldwork, as well as selected project results. Workpackage 14 is led by the University of Hertfordshire (UH), in the UK.