06/09/2012
The meeting titled Families, care and work facing the challenges of a globalized world: policies, practices and services, will address the “hot issue” of managing care and work in everyday family life and on the societal level of policies, cultural patterns, and welfare regimes. Families are always under pressure as they are involved in economic, social, cultural events characterising the contemporary world and thus have to manage the challenges prompted by the conditions of global crisis. Further, families are facing every day life , with the managing of educational and care tasks and the balancing of internal and external requests during all the family life-cycle. Indeed, each stressful event, as the impairment of a family member, challenges family life and compels the subjects to act some reflexivity on their everyday life.
The redefinition of gender roles, the need for reconciliation between family and work, the presence of immigrants taking up the role of caregivers and the second demographic transition are profoundly changing the taken-for-granted negotiations among genders and generations.
In a rapidly changing world a multitude of new challenges are emerging and affecting families and individual life; at the same time the welfare state is subject to crisis in many parts of the world. A globally encompassing capitalism is deeply involved and the consequences of the recent financial crisis are felt worldwide. Due to this, many countries are struggling to develop new policies to maintain good level of social welfare; the need for an in-depth understanding of social problems is urgent and requires an updated rethinking of causes, mechanisms and solutions, applied to policies and services as well.
Recent literature and researches indicate some potentially fruitful indicators.
The focus of the conference is to shed light on the role of different agents (state, market, third sector), relationships and social policies in combining care and work within the families; for example, to identify services of excellence as for quality, efficiency and efficacy and programs promoting to empower family’s capability to keep on generate social capital.
Organized by
GIOVANNA ROSSI, Catholic University of Milan, Athenaeum Centre for Family Studies and Research, Italy
and ISABELLA CRESPI, University of Macerata, Dept. Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism, Italy
Programma in allegato