Australian Social Policy Conference 2007
I was lucky enough to have been able attend the 2007 Australian Social Policy Conference hosted by the Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney last month. Apart from being a great chance to catch up with some old friends (I was a visitor to the SPRC in 2005), it was also a very stimulating conference. Myself and Stefan Kühner presented our paper ‘Towards Productive Welfare?‘ at the final paper stream of the conference (on Friday 13th!).
The two of us also spent some time visiting the University of Sydney, where we met up with former York colleague Gyu-Jin Hwang, who has just started a lectureship in social policy there. Aside from giving Jin mountains of abuse for having landed a job in one of the world’s greatest cities, the three of us also put together some plans to take forward our work on the interactions between ideas, institutions and interests; a paper outlining our early ideas (and drawing on case studies of Third Way politics in Germany and the UK) is appearing in the Journal of Social Policy early in 2008.
