FRIPRO ERC Solidarity welfare: New forms of social assistance in Europe’s crises

Project's ERC background: The PI went to interview-stage with an ERC Starting Grant Application (entitled: "Solidarity welfare: New forms of social assistance in Europe’s crises") in June 2018. The project was viewed very favourably. The assessment did not situate the project "high enough in the ranking to be funded (given the budgetary limits)" but the project was "put on the reserve list of proposals that might be invited to grant preparation if proposals with a higher ranking drop out or additional funding becomes available". The PI will rework grant application and improve CV through a buy-out from other teaching and administrative duties. Project proposal summary: SOLIDARITY WELFARE is a comparative project of ethnographic research located in Italy, Spain and Greece. These sites are emblematic worldwide for their centrality in two interrelated “crises” that shape the contemporary world, one humanitarian (refugee) and one financial (austerity). The project, comparing ethnographic data from similar but different sites of solidarity activity in three countries, will establish a socio-cultural understanding of grassroots humanitarianism and of novel forms of social assistance. Focusing on informal welfare assistance to citizens and foreigners, it will provide us with an innovative anthropological definition of solidarity. It will also examine the relational aspect of humanitarian action and of welfare. Specifically, it will elucidate what motivates people in solidarity practice, how people deploy idioms and ideas of solidarity when providing welfare assistance to their peers and how this new phenomenon is establishing alternative routes of social welfare in crisis-ridden Europe.