Critical Junctures & Processes

This theme explores the individual, structural and societal determinants of disadvantage and advantage for individuals and groups susceptible to risk and precarity. ILAS work programmes concentrate on the interchanges between processes of exclusion and inclusion, and explores key life transitions around health, education, work and retirement, bereavement and migration. Work on this theme engages with key public policy constructs, such as social protection, social inclusion, equity, and human rights, interrogating the relevance of existing polices for potentially marginalised groups. ILAS programmes are targeted at addressing critical gaps in measurement and weakness in policy frameworks that exacerbate rather than ameliorate existing inequalities.

Important work streams in the theme of critical junctures and processes includes:

• Social Categories and Accumulated Disadvantage: Projects that assess the implications of different social categories (e.g. age; gender, ethnicity, disability) on the accumulation of disadvantage across the life course. Examples of work on this theme include: ICSG research programmes on life-course experiences of deprivation for diverse groups of the population.
• Trajectories of Social Exclusion: Work that examines how individual level factors (e.g. early life events; life transitions) combine with macro levels factors (e.g. policy and welfares systems, societal institutions and norms) to construct multidimensional forms of exclusion. Examples of work on this theme include: 11 HEPAC analysis of the impact of health and health behaviours on social and economic outcomes, ICSG work on the conceptual development of old-age multidimensional exclusion frameworks.
• Diminished Rights and Power: activities that interrogate the social and legal mechanisms that lead to the deprivation of rights, power and liberty for different population groups. Examples of work on this theme include: CDLP programmes on the diminishing power and liberty of some individuals living with a disability.
• Economic Stability and Insecurity: Programmes that investigate how social, institutional and political structures can create life-course pathways of economic precarity and personal financial insecurity. Examples of work on this theme includes: ICSG led research on extended working life policies, gendered income dependency and later life pension access.