Using un/deservingness as a conceptual prism allows the research team to engage in three long-term ethnographic studies. These aim at accessing three arenas of Un/Deservingness (naturalisation procedures in Switzerland, family policy in Hungary, and fiscal and welfare policies in Austria), conceived as historically embedded spaces of relations and struggles for resources, within which claims and contestations of un/deservingness condense and escalate.
In these arenas, the specificities and peculiarities of genealogies, configurations, and contestations can be foregrounded while working on a common theoretical theme: the moralisation of inequality.
The three sub-projects are hence designed as both immersive and comparative, a combination that promises a more thorough empirical understanding and theoretical framing of contemporary conjunctures of inequality in Europe.