Amount Awarded: $12,500
The project builds upon and extend a cross-national collaboration aimed at understanding core questions related to schooling, social welfare, and inclusion. We investigate how schools and local welfare agencies interact to promote or detract from the social inclusion and wellbeing of children, and how larger social and educational policy regimes are related to daily practices in schools and other local agencies. The empirical part is based on a comparison of different schools and associated welfare and support systems in three Nordic and in one US city (including survey and register data, school interviews, administrative and expert interviews, organisation and document analysis). For a deeper understanding of how the schools and local welfare agencies works, we develop ambitious cross-national mixed method comparisons and new theoretical models of how these institutions work. The project brings together a broad range of expertise, data and theoretical perspectives that will enable us to explore facilitators and barriers in different schools and associated welfare and support systems. The knowledge gained is developed in a joint book project on how social reproduction through the educational system creates durable inequalities in childhood, in joint workshops, and Ph.D. training promoting research mobility and collaboration between Norwegian and US scholars.