The thematic area Justice, Institutions, and Social Change explores the complex relationships between societal values, the structures that govern different societies and communities, and how social science research can deliver new interdisciplinary approaches in understanding social change.  We understand institutions in a broad sense, encompassing organisational structures such as border agencies, schools, courts, and civil society organisations, as well as the rules, ideas, and ideologies that underpin these structures.  A focus on justice, institutions, and social change is essential both as a means of generating better social science theory and knowledge and as a way of delivering on critical areas of engagement and impact.  The thematic area welcomes proposals that show, through a range of approaches and theories, processes of social transformation, broadly understood, and how these transformations reveal the political, social and economic forces at work.  

Our thematic area supports a wide range of projects.  These often take the form of detailed case studies.  Recent examples include a postdoctoral project on livelihoods transitions in Odisha, India where a combination of ethnographic and archival work is helping us better understand the complex ways agrarian lifeworlds are changing under conditions of climate change.  Doctoral projects include new and challenging social science work on migrant deaths at sea off the coast of the Canary Islands, bringing into conversation data from migrant advocacy groups, social workers, nurses and doctors, border enforcement officials, and migrants themselves.   There are also a large number of projects in the Justice, Institutions, and Social Change thematic area that focus on gender and sexuality.   

We also support research that utilises large datasets or conducts policy analysis at various institutional levels. For example, Justice Institutions and Social Change is supporting new research to measure housing deprivation in Europe better.  This project involves working in novel ways across a range of national and European-level datasets, with policy engagement built into the project design.  We are also supporting a project on the lived experiences of those employed under the highly skilled migrant visa systems in the UK, Canada and Australia.  Here, a mix of policy and discourse analysis works with a dataset built through interviews with HR professionals, journalists, and skilled migrants themselves to generate a better understanding of how these schemes are actually experienced. 

The thematic area is particularly interested in exploring the potential of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of justice, institutions and social change.  We welcome projects that bring together diverse methods, including work that supports and empowers participants in the research process.  Ongoing work on Kurdish women forcibly disappeared in the 1990s, for example, engages with narratives that have been silenced in official records.  Uncovering those narratives means using a range of “forensic” methods to uncover bureaucratic traces and textual remains of the disappearances.  The project then employs a different set of methods to bring these lives to life in the public record.  This sort of work delivers critical analysis, while also generating significant societal impacts and community benefits.