Social Rights, Crisis and Austerity
This project analyses the complex and multi-layered relationship between social rights and markets. We are interested in how the relationship between social rights and markets might be conceptualised, and how conflict and competition between the two might be theorised.
It begins with the question of whether social rights can effectively, if at all, mediate the operation of markets in the direction of better/optimal performance, or whether they are only ever modes of redressing the inequities of market outcomes. If the latter, do social rights provide effective ways of redressing such inequities, or, given a certain modus operandi and a globalised economy, do they make social protection more costly for those who most need it? We are interested in how social rights might inform critical legal theory and critical intervention amidst a wider generalisation of market logic and the spread of conditions that are increasingly hostile towards the demands of ‘social’ protection. Can social rights, we ask, give us adequate leverage to overcome this hostility, or do we need to look towards alterative ways of tempering market produced and market enhanced inequality?
GLT has already hosted two workshops on Social Rights, Crisis and Austerity. In these workshops, GLT members alongside invited researchers used case studies and examples from the context of work and of education to open up and explore questions in the project brief.
Past Events
The Case for Education (2013)
The Case of Work (2013)
Publications
E Christodoulidis, F Atria, J Holmwood, R Keat, D Garland, ‘Debate and Dialogue: Social Rights and Markets’ (2015) 24(4) Social & Legal Studies 595-636
(Photo: [from left to right] Michelle Everson, Ruth Dukes, Diamond Ashiagbor)