300432 Welfare States, Kinship and Community: Global Approaches to Supporting Families (S) (SoSe 2026)

In the Global North, welfare states have long supported families through cash transfers and services that provide time and resources for care. In much of the Global South, by contrast, kinship, family, and community networks play a central role in economic survival and in providing productive, reproductive, and emotional support, reflecting weaker or less comprehensive welfare-state provision. Rather than treating informal support as a residual or inferior substitute, recent scholarship calls for an integrated approach that studies formal policies and informal provision together. Across regions, governments increasingly seek to connect formal programs to informal networks, underscoring their continued importance. Informal support also remains vital in the Global North, for example through grandparents’ childcare for dual-earner families. This seminar examines how welfare policies, kinship, and community networks reduce family burdens, the strengths and limits of each, and how these systems interact. It provides opportunities to explore functional equivalents of welfare programs in contexts where formal welfare provision remains limited or fragmented.