Project description
How one term redefined poverty in Europe
Following the Maastricht Treaty, a new poverty term gained ground in Europe: underclass. This is a term loaded with stigma. Coined in the US, it crossed the ocean and began to alter how politics, media, and scholarly discourse spoke of poverty and marginalisation. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the UCinEU project looks at how the term was adapted to meet the post-industrial realities of Britain, Germany, and Italy. In tracing its influence in policy, journalism, and speeches, it shows how the underclass label helped pave the way for the uneven application of neoliberal reforms. Drawing on history, sociology, and cultural studies, UCinEU demonstrates how transatlantic thought altered European common sense.
Objective
The aim of this project is to write a cultural history of the different ways in which the American construct of the ‘underclass’ was exported to different European national contexts in the twenty years following the Maastricht Treaty. Through a web of transatlantic relations, the concept was modified and adapted to those segments of the population that were hit the hardest by the ongoing processes of deindustrialisation, thus impacting the way in which Europeans problematized poverty and marginalisation. Academic writing, journalism and politicians’ speeches became the vectors of a gradual change that involved public policy at all levels, as well as national common sense. The project aims at verifying the hypothesis that the importation and adaptation of the concept of ‘underclass’ was functional to the differentiated implementation of neoliberal policies in different but interrelated contexts. It focuses such exploration on Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom. The choice of making it as cultural history is based on the premise that the magnitude of this shift in policy and mentality can only be gauged through an interdisciplinary methodology integrating analytic tools from history, sociology and cultural studies. Thus, as a scholar of literature and culture, I have chosen as my prospective supervisors two sociologists. Should my application be successful, I would be working with Professor Fabio Perocco at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, who has long worked on the comparative sociology of inequality, and with Professor Loïc Wacquant at the University of California, Berkeley, whose symbolic-sociological analysis of various aspects of neoliberalism has informed much of the theoretical frame of this project, and who has done extensive work on the history of the concept of ‘underclass’ in the United States.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences sociology
- social sciences media and communications journalism
- humanities history and archaeology history
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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30123 Venezia
Italy
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