Keynote Speakers Mary Daly and Michael Ungar
Mary Daly: Resilience and Comparative Welfare State Analysis: Is it the Big New Idea in Social Policy
Resilience is widely promoted today, applied to many different fields and problems. Among the reasons for its popularity are that it picks up on growing insecurity and lack of certainty as a feature of modern-day living. Crisis and shock are core notions in the concept as is agency. Social policy is one of the fields that resilience has not (yet) been widely applied to. This keynote takes up the question of whether and how the concept can be used to better understand, and even champion, welfare state development. It will address three main questions: To what issues does resilience direct our attention and how does it compare to existing ‘big’ ideas in the field (e.g. social investment)? What is its potential as a lens for policy analysis? What might a social policy model inspired by resilience look like?
Our keynote speaker on Thursday, 15 May, is Mary Daly. She holds the Chair in Sociology and Social Policy based at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. She is a Governing Body Fellow of Green Templeton College Oxford and a member of the British Academy as well as the Academy of Social Sciences. Most of her work is comparative, in a European and international context. Substantively, she is interested in and has published widely on the following social policy areas:
- long-term care and care for children;
- gender inequality;
- family policy;
- poverty and welfare state reform.
Mary Daly’s research has been supported by, among others, the Economic and Social Research Council, Horizon Europe, ILO, Council of Europe, UNWomen and UNICEF. Her current research focuses on the concept of resilience and whether and how it can be applied to families. This research is being carried out under the sic-country rEUsilience project.
Michael Ungar: Nurturing Resilience During Uncertain Times: The Many Ways Families, Mental Health Services and Communities Help Children Thrive
Globally, the way resilience is understood is shifting from individual responsibility for mental health to a definition of resilience that emphasizes the need for biological, psychological, social, institutional and ecological factors to work together to make the experience of resilience possible. In this presentation, Dr. Ungar will explain how multiple systems, from families to healthcare, can nurture resilience of child populations experiencing adversity by accounting for the complex multisystemic interactions that predict which children will do well despite the seriousness of the challenges they face. Using case examples of children, youth and families that have been exposed to high levels of adversity such as family violence, mental illness of a child or caregiver, natural disasters, forced migration, poverty, racism and other types of social marginalization and political conflict, Dr. Ungar will show how we can assess childhood resilience in a contextually sensitive, culturally relevant way and use that assessment to guide practice and policy. Seven factors common to children around the world who cope well under adversity and avoid problems like depression, PTSD, and delinquency will be discussed, along with strategies to change the social and physical environments that surround them.
Our keynote speaker on Friday, 16 May, is the founder and Director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University, Michael Ungar.
In 2022, Dr. Ungar was ranked the number one social work scholar in the world in recognition of his ground-breaking work as a family therapist and resilience researcher.
His work has influenced the way human development and organizational processes are understood and studied globally, with much of Dr. Ungar’s clinical work and scholarship focused on the resilience of marginalized children, families, and adult populations experiencing mental health challenges at home and in the workplace.
Dr. Ungar’s work emphasizes how to use the theory of resilience to increase both individual and institutional agility during crises.
>> Read more about Micheal Ungar
>> Read Michael Ungar’s blog Nurturing Resilience | Psychology Today