Social Europe Podcast Social Europe

Around the world, education 'reforms' have made schooling more market-mimicking and competitive, rendering education a 'club good' for the better off. Finland shows how treating education as a public good and teachers as autonomous professionals brings better student performance overall, without intrusive and expensive inspection.

Philipp Ther, professor of central-European history at the University of Vienna and director of its Research Centre for the History of Transformations, talks to Robin Wilson of Social Europe about how societies which show hospitality to refugees in the long run benefit from their openness. Prof Ther is author of The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe Since 1492 (Princeton University Press).

Albena Azmanova is an associate professor in political and social thought at the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies and author most recently of Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity can Achieve Radical Change without Crisis or Utopia (Columbia University Press). She talks to Robin Wilson, acting editor-in-chief of Social Europe.

Thomas Piketty is a French economist who is professor of economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), associate chair at the Paris School of Economics and centennial professor of economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics.

Vivien A. Schmidt, Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration, Professor of International Relations, and Professor of Political Science at Boston University talks to Social Europe about Europe's crisis of legitimacy and the interrelationship between democratic legitimacy at the European level and the ongoing Eurozone crisis.

Mary Daly, professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Oxford and author of Gender Inequality and Welfare States in Europe, talks to Social Europe about how applying a gender lens changes our understanding of the welfare state and how it should be reconstructed after the pandemic.