ERC project vacancy: Coping with decline: Comparative social-historical analysis of depopulation and community welfare in Europe, 1950-2022
HHH member Yuliya Hilevych has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for a project examining welfare provision, especially around health and care, in depopulating European communities since the 1950s.
The project members are looking for colleagues who are working on community health and care provision through the lenses of lived experiences (e.g. oral histories), regional data on welfare provision, and various organisations, such as social workers and paramedics, as well as social entrepreneurial and grassroots initiatives.
Please get in touch with Yuliya (y.o.hilevych@rug.nl), if these areas speak to your research and you are interested in collaborating with the project.
Project description
Coping with decline: Comparative social-historical analysis of depopulation and community welfare in Europe, 1950-2022 (DEPOP)
Until now, Europe’s population has been growing. However, after 2023, it is projected to decline continuously. The underbelly of this decline has been regional depopulation – that is decline in population and decline in welfare since the 1950s. Yet, we still know little about how these two historical declines have been linked, and how communities have coped with them.
My team and I will address this lacuna by producing the social history of depopulation in Europe, the first of its kind. DEPOP will shed a new light on the histories of ‘stayers’ in rural and urban communities, and on their welfare in health and care sectors by paying close attention to the role of gender, class, age, ability, and ethnicity/race. We will focus on the North-West-East comparison: Finland –the Netherlands – Ukraine.
By doing so, DEPOP will illuminate regional depopulation as a potent example of a slow burn crisis – occurring over extended periods of time. Our historical findings will help to better understand how and why some communities have been more resilient to the slow burn crisis of depopulation.
