Stefan KA¶ngeter – författare

Transnational Social Policy highlights the changing face of social policy and social work against the background of accelerating transnationalization of economies, labour markets, education, social services, and care. The contributions of this book provide unique case examples on the interplay of social policies, mobile populations, and travelling knowledge about welfare within an increasingly asymmetrical global context. This innovative volume also includes historical studies on the transformations of social policies during the last century and reflects the developments of social welfare across the Global North and the Global South. With its emphasis on theoretical assumptions of policy translation, the case studies show the importance of adjustments, negotiations, and participation of various actors in the transnational social field of welfare production. Thus, within ever-shifting contexts of new political agendas promoting the free play of the market and a neoliberal agenda of competition and austerity, this insightful book reveals new transnational forms of social exclusion that function within, across, and in-between nation-states.

Presenting a major and much needed addition to current discussions on globalization and the increasing complexity of worldwide social relations, this volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students interested in fields such as Social Policy, Social Work, Public Administration, Development Studies, Political Science, and Sociology, as well as many interdisciplinary fields including Global Studies, International Development Studies, and Immigration and Settlement Studies.

Migrants, both spatially and mentally, no longer settle in only one national territory but interact or move across borders regularly, profoundly challenging the nation-state and the image of society as a container. This volume explores the ways in which migrants, activists and professionals connect social worlds across national boundaries through a variety of social practices. The contributions from various disciplines - anthropology, economics, political and social sciences, educational studies and social work - illuminate the meaning of agency in situations where the capabilities of transnational actors are constrained by nation-states, their borders and social institutions. Based on a relational understanding of transnational agency which builds upon new insights and developments within transnational studies and network theory, this compilation of chapters presents transnational processes and developments in and across various regions of the globe - in East Asia, the Americas, the EU, Southeast Asia, Africa and Australia, in the borderlands of Mexico and the US, in the transatlantic space of the 19th-century fin de siècle world - in order to demonstrate the importance of gaining, assisting and expanding agency in transnational contexts.