CFP: Unpolitical Politics? Public action for social protection in Europe from the late 19^th through the early 21st centuries

We are delighted to announce the call for papers for the upcoming volume “Unpolitical Politics”. 

With this call for papers, we seek contributors to an innovative document reader organized around the paradoxical notion of “unpolitical politics” as a form of individual or collective public action undertaken by many actors working in the field of social protection, broadly conceived. “Unpolitical politics” is, for our purposes, more of an analytic concept than an emic/native formulation, as these actors did not necessarily express themselves in precisely this language. We believe that this concept constitutes a broad problématique that is transversal to our entire Action. It therefore holds potential for pulling together a wide range of findings, themes, and approaches that have emerged across members’ individual studies and transversal projects. The reader will consist of contextualized presentations and critical readings of a short document or set of documents regarding a public action in the field of social protection, interpreted (analyzed) in light of the concept of “unpolitical politics.”

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We are convinced that the notion of unpolitical politics offers a novel analytic lens through which we may present a wide range of documents produced from the late 19^th through the early 21^st centuries across the full geographic space of that very large Europe that our Action covers. Read through the particular kind of bottom-up perspective that our triadic approach affords (families, associations and states as co-constructors of social welfare), the documents presented in this reader will, when taken together, constitute a kind of “blueprint” for the entire COST Action “Who Cares in Europe?” As such, “Unpolitical Politics?” will stand as a signature publication for our Action.

We invite you all to contribute to this source reader with a short document (or set of documents) which you then introduce and contextualize in a brief entry of no more than 4000 words (document and commentary/contextualization combined). Translation and editing costs will be covered.

Please find the call for papers in its entirety in the PDF attached.

Submission guidelines:

Please fill in the template attached to the PDF and send your proposals to Ellianna Farazi ellianna.farazi@parisdescartes.fr  by April 15, 2022.

For more information, please contact

 Efi Avdela avdela@uoc.gr
Clarisse Berthezène clarisse.berthezene@u-paris.fr
Laura Lee Downs Laura.Downs@eui.eu
Dominika Gruziel dominika.gruziel@eui.eu
Dimitra Lampropoulou dlamprop@arch.uoa.gr