Welfare Systems and Social Inequalities

The course will provide information and insights on the interaction between welfare state studies and social inequality, offering the opportunity to students to learn how to develop their own research from an analytical, methodological, and content perspective. It will focus on specific social policy fields and it will show how concretely their way of functioning helps to create or hinder social inequalities. It will adopt a comparative perspective. The social policy fields under examination will be: family policies (toward young children and frail elderly); education; pension and health care.
The course does not intend to offer a whole review of the research in these fields but to focus on studies (and the relative methodology) that can help students interested in these topics to advance in their own research.