Call for chapters proposals: “What is Covid-19 teaching us on Disability Welfare European Policy?”
Changes on policies and services for cognitive disabled people during the pandemic in Europe
Angela Genova (Università Carlo Bo, Urbino, Italy), Alice Scavarda (Università di Torino, Italy) and Maria Świątkiewicz-Mośny (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland) are developing a co-edited book project, tentatively titled: “What is Covid-19 teaching us on Disability Welfare European Policy?”.
The disability welfare policy results from the last decades’ reform process in each European country in a path dependency perspective. Significant, non -incremental change is unlikely. Nevertheless, Covid-19 represents an exogenous shock, affecting the structure of Disability Welfare Policy in Europe, as institutions and processes that form the infrastructural framework for policy decisions. From one side, Disability Welfare Policy responses to the pandemic emergency might be considered in relation to the state-of- the-art of the policies at the arrival of the pandemic, as a result of policy reforms in the years before the pandemic. From the other side, the pandemic emergency outlines a conjuncture where contingency (pandemic as an exogenous shock) shows weakness in the structural aspect of the system (institutional policy context as the endogenous dimension) and, therefore, potentially calls for the significant change.
The proposed volume is aimed at firstly analysing how Covid-19 is affecting social practices in Welfare Disability Policies, whether with incremental or big reforms and at secondly producing a set of international good practices, by comparing the social practices and potential innovations in different countries. It will contain recommendations for action at European level by public officials, policy makers, and the public. The volume will be published by Emerald, one of the leading academic international publishers (https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/).
Please consider preparing a chapter for the 2022 publication. We ask you, individually or with colleagues, to consider submitting a long proposal (2-3 pages) identifying a significant social practice at national or local level, concerning Disability Welfare Policy in the pandemic time (from January 2020 on) in one or more policy areas: social, health, housing, educational, labour policies. We invite you to focus on cognitive disability and to carry out a qualitative project, based on the analysis of official documents and interviews with key informants or stakeholders. You are kindly asked to structure your abstract around the research questions, the methodology and the description of the case study. Please follow the outline:
1. Introduction
2. Welfare Disabled Policy in your country
3. The methodology with research questions
4. Case description [why do you choose that case, what is specific about it ….]
The editors of this volume invite interested participants to prepare draft statements for proposed contributions to the 2022 publication. Please submit a copy of your proposal via email (as specified below) to each of the committee members by 16 May 2021. You will get information from us by the beginning of June. We plan to organize some workshops and supporting actions for all involved in the process.
Selected final contributions will be limited to 6000 words (or roughly twenty double-spaced manuscript pages). Chapter drafts will be due 31 October 2021, and final manuscripts will be due 28 February 2022. All are welcome to email the editors for any clarification.
Angela Genova (angela.genova(at)uniurb.it)
Alice Scavarda (alice.scavarda(at)unito.it)
Maria Świątkiewicz-Mośny (maria.swiatkiewicz-mosny(at)uj.edu.pl)
