The 2nd Forum on Welfare State and Social Policy (March 19-20th 2022) was concluded successfully
March 19th and 20th,2022,The “2nd Forum on Welfare State and Social Policy”, hosted by the School of Government management/Center for Chinese Public Administration Research was successfully held in SUN YAT-SEN University in a hybrid format (online and offline) on the VooV platform. A total of 45 scholars from 18 universities, senior experts and early career researchers, attended the webinar and shared ideas and exciting new research topics and trends.
The Forum is already at its second edition, and it has further evolved from its beginning in 2021. The 1st Forum on Welfare State and Social Policy (2021) had a specific focus aimed at facilitating scholarly exchange on social policy reform between Chinese and Korean experts. This year, the focus embraced a much broader pool of experts from across the four continents of Asia, Europe, US, and Australia. China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Singapore were represented for discussions covering Asia, which keeps being our key region of interest. Additional perspectives where offered from scholars based in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Finland for the European continent, and we did gain further international input from experts hailing from the United States and Australia.
Due to the ongoing pandemic and restrictions to travel, most participants to the Forum attended the event online on the experimental platform of VooV (which is widely used in China). Still, we successfully attracted considerable interest, thus setting the basis to build a platform for colleagues to share ideas about social policy structure and mechanisms, and related reforms in different counties and regions in the world. Asian economies are no longer pushing on economic growth only, but on social policy and redistribution as well, thus it is necessary to engage international scholarship in these developments, starting from academia in China.
The 2022 Forum featured 10 Sessions: ‘East Asian social policies’, ‘Health policy’, ‘Care for the older adults’, ‘Labour market flexibility’, ‘Family policy’, ‘Journal editors talk’, ‘Health governance in China’, ‘Graduate students’ session’, ‘Poverty and living conditions’, ‘Welfare and public institutions’. Discussions involved the latest trends in current social policy in East Asia from a comparative perspective, with a focus on latest developments in terms of social services’ growth in East Asia.
The event greatly benefitted from the contributions of Prof. Heejung CHUNG (University of Kent) and Prof. Kerry RATIGAN (Amherst University), who generously shared ideas from their latest book publications on, respectively, the flexibility paradox in the labour market (session 4), and health governance in China (session 7). The Forum also hosted a productive panel of indexed journal editors, including: Chinese Public Administration Review (CPAR), Journal of Asian Public Policy (JAPP), Asia Pacific Journal of Social Work and Development (APJSWD), and Journal of Poverty and Social Justice (JPSJ). We sincerely thank every single participant for contributing to an exciting discussion and making us all learn from this unique event.
Although not exhaustive, the following is a collection of photos for participants to enjoy and sear these moments as precious memories, in the hopes to be able to meet offline in the near future.
