The DIGCLASS seminar series is expected to facilitate the exchange of cutting-edge ideas and debates between JRC researchers and social science academics from research institutions worldwide.

With the DIGCLASS seminar series, we want to push this discussion beyond the boundaries of the JRC community by attracting external scholars, policy-makers and a general audience.

Areas of interest:

• Social inequality, social stratification
• Labour economics
• Political economy, political behaviour

Seminars take place once monthly on Tuesdays from 15.00 to 16.00 CET in a fully open-access online format. We will publish further details on sessions’ access and contents below and on the JRC EU Science Hub events in due time. 

If you want to subscribe to the DIGCLASS seminar series mailing list to stay tuned, please drop us an email to JRC-CAS-DIGCLASS@ec.europa.eu

Real Utopias for a Social Europe consists of a series of technical debate-type workshops on various bold and innovative social policy proposals. Leading academic experts and policy-makers assess and discuss the feasibility, distributional impact, costs, and scalability of these policy proposals through evidence-based on various designs such as pilots, field experiments, microsimulation exercises, and real policy experiences. The objective is to bolster a hivemind that can provide scientifically rigorous yet creative tools to tackle growing socioeconomic inequalities and the green transition in the context of major social transformations ahead.

Thematic workshops on health and educational inequalities.

The Kick-off Workshop of the Social Classes in the Digital Age (DIGCLASS) project was held on the 21-22 of September 2021. The kick-off workshop was a high-level event with more than 100 participants that brought together 13 high-profile international experts on social inequality from different social science disciplines to discuss technological change and inequality, two topics directly under the European Commission’s priorities. The objective was to generate synergies with leading experts and institutions globally on these two key areas to feed the policy process relevant for the Commission. The programme was structured around four overarching questions: 1. Are existing systems of social protection adequate for the digital age? 2. Are contemporary societies still class-based? 3. How are digital technologies transforming the social structure? 4. Does socioeconomic position still drive political outcomes? Each of the questions were addressed by three to four experts in a round table format, offering a stimulating debate on the implications of technological change for social inequalities and aiming to promote collaboration between the CAS and leading experts and institutions globally, in order to help shape and inform policy making of the Commission.