29 September 2015: Peggy Levitt
Global Social Protection: Protecting and Providing Outside the Nation-State Framework
In today’s world, more than 220 million people live in a country that is not their own. Nevertheless, the provision of social protection, and the policy-making that undergirds it, remains largely confined to the national level. How are people on the move protected and provided for in this new global context? Have institutional sources of social welfare begun to cross borders to meet the needs of transnational individuals? In this first Sarah van Walsum Lecture, Peggy Levitt (Wellesley College and Harvard University) introduces a new Global Social Protection (GSP) research agenda aimed at answering questions about which protections exist for transnational individuals, which protections can travel across borders, who can access these protections, and who is left out.
Peggy Levitt is Chair and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College and a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. She is also the co-director of the Transnational Studies Initiative at Harvard.
