In recent years, social entrepreneurs have been hailed by policymakers as visionary actors capable of responding to intersecting crises - from welfare retrenchment and health crises to ecological breakdown - by delivering social needs provision while fostering more inclusive and sustainable forms of economic activity. Yet despite the prominence attributed to them, we know relatively little about how social entrepreneurs themselves envision the future of welfare. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation in Athens and Berlin, this talk examines the meaning-making practices through which social entrepreneurs interpret, justify, and reimagine welfare and social needs provision.  

Social entrepreneurship emerges as a site in which the imaginary and moral economy of welfare are subtly reordered - particularly in how distinctions between the social and the economic, public provision and private initiative, and deservingness are negotiated. This talk introduces the notion of “welfare reform by stealth”, whereby normative expectations surrounding social needs provision change without the need for overt policy reform. Soudias suggests that this reordering reshapes which actors are recognized as legitimate for the provision of welfare, how welfare is oriented toward the future, and what welfare itself is understood to be. 

About Dr. Dimitris Soudias

Dr. Dimitris Soudias served as Principal Investigator of the recently completed DFG-funded project Welfare Visions 2.0: Future-Making Practices in the Social Economies of Athens and Berlin (WELFAIR), which explored how social entrepreneurs envision and enact the future of the economy and social needs provision. Building on this work, Dimitris is currently developing a new agenda on the epistemic assumptions behind problem-solving and futures-thinking in experimental governance labs. He is a visiting fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University. He is the author of Paradoxes of Emancipation: Radical Imagination and Space in Neoliberal Greece (Syracuse University Press, now open access) and, among other articles, Transmuting Solidarity: Hybrid-economic Practices in the Social Economy in Greece (Journal of Cultural Economy).

Drinks & snacks afterwards.

Livestream

If you are not able to join in person, you can also follow the talk and discussion via the live stream (with the option to pose a question in the chat).