The project MOBILISE started in May 2019 at the University of Geneva. The first months were dedicated to carry out documentary research and to prepare periods of fieldwork in Britain, Spain and The Netherlands, where trials of different forms of guaranteed income had taken place in recent years. Unfortunately, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to suspend fieldwork. Overall, the pandemic led to a substantial alteration of the work plan, which was adjusted to the new circumstances of limited mobility and travel restrictions. The main changes consisted in replacing fieldwork with the analysis of secondary data (newspaper articles of major European newspapers), to study how basic income has been framed by the media in the last 15 years; and the preparation of a survey experiment that would allow testing whether individuals are more or less prone to support a basic income under different configurations of actors making the proposal for such policy. This survey was carried out in Spain.
The main results of the project MOBILISE include research articles, conference papers, presentations in workshops, and book chapters. In particular, and considering only academic publications, the outcomes so far include four peer-reviewed research articles, one book chapter. In addition to these outcomes, other publications are currently under review or in preparation:
- a research article that outlines the role of activists in the mainstreaming of universal basic income in Britain during the 2010 (article currently submitted to a sociology journal, and under review).
- a research article that study the framing of universal basic income in two major European newspapers (The Guardian, Corriere della Sera), in two countries that experimented reforms in their social assistance systems during the last decade (Britain and Italy).
- a research article that presents the results of a survey experiment in which we attempt to determine whether individuals support more or less a proposal of a universal basic income, depending on the actor(s) that make such proposal to the public.
- a book chapter, that makes the case for the recent emergence of a global social movement striving for ideas based on the notions of universal basic income, guaranteed income, citizen's income, and income security.
These outcomes will be widely disseminated after publication.
