Argues that a new set of transnational social welfare arrangements has emerged that challenge traditional social welfare provision based on national citizenship and residence.

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM (Pacific Time)
Webinar

The idea that social rights are something we are eligible for based on where we live or where we are citizens is out-of-date. In Transnational Social Protection, Peggy Levitt, Erica Dobbs, Ken Chih-Yan Sun, and Ruxandra Paul consider what happens to social welfare when more and more people live, work, study, and retire outside their countries of citizenship where they receive health, education, and elder care. The authors use the concept of resource environment to show how migrants and their families piece together packages of protections from multiple sources in multiple settings and the ways that these vary by place and time. They further show how a new, hybrid transnational social protection regime has emerged in response to the changing environment that complements, supplements, or, in some cases, substitutes for national social welfare systems as we knew them. Examining how national social welfare is affected when migration and mobility become an integral part of everyday life, this book moves our understanding of social protection from the national to the transnational.

• Debunks the expectation that it is states that are the primary providers of social welfare to their citizens and that they do so only to citizens living within their borders
• Shows how a hybrid transnational social protection regime varies across regions and across the lifecyle
• Evaluates the resulting redistribution of access to social protections and who the new winners and losers are

Speakers:

Peggy Levitt is the Mildred Lane Kemper Chair of Sociology and the Chair of the sociology department at Wellesley College. She is also a co-founder of the Global (De)Centre. Levitt has received Honorary Doctoral Degrees from the University of Helsinki (2017) and from Maastricht University (2014). She was recently a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute (2017-2019) and a Distinguished Visitor at the Baptist University of Hong Kong (2019). Her earlier books include Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (2015), Religion on the Edge (Oxford, 2012), God Needs No Passport (2007), The Transnational Studies Reader (2007), The Changing Face of Home (2002), and The Transnational Villagers (2001).

Erica Dobbs is Assistant Professor of Politics at Pomona College. Her research explores how mass migration forces both states and individuals to rethink the dynamics of political and social citizenship in liberal democratic societies. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Oxford Migration Studies, and other outlets, and has received support from the Fulbright-Schuman program for the European Union, the American Council of Learned Societies foundation, and the Hirsch Research Initiation program at Pomona College.

Sponsor(s): Center for Study of International Migration, CCIS, UCSD