"Covid changed everything". This is a sentence I heard a lot and still occasionally keep hearing.

The pandemic - any other might have as well - has laid bare many structural inequalities, weaknesses, some even siay the failure of capitalism.

As a sociologist, I found this crisis extremely interesting to study (I am and was not the only one). Not just to exploit the novel and  unexpected, , but because I am sincerely intersted in the longer-term lessons we can learn from such a crisis. Before Covid, I always said "the next massive pandemic is going to come out of a pig farm". Well, I was wrong. But not about the origin lying in our meat consumption and our way of treating other lave that ar not human. Challenges and crises seem ahead, foremost all, climate change.

 

With my research I want to explore the following topics:

• How a sudden freeze in public services triggered informal support and civic engagement, and how such civic engeagement may benefit givers and receivers in the longer term

• How the rapid digitalization that forcedly occured during lockdown measures impacted on older adults' well-being and other aspect of helath in later life

• How such an encompassing crisis may reinforce gender inequalities in the division of paid and unpaid labour in families, and how that related to mental health and distress

• How the potentially problematic impolications of encompassing measures for inequalities affect citizens' perception and acceptacne of such policies

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The latter two points are adressed in a larger project that is funded and hosted by the University of Konstanz' Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality". The Project Covid-19 Policies for Gender Equality (CoPE) investigates several aspects of gender inequalities: employment, childcare, housework, essential worker status, but also policy debates. The project is comparative and draws on five country cases: Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, FInland and the UK. The group of thirteen researchers and collaborators affiliated with this project comes from four countries and seven research institutions in six cities: Utrecht, Helsinki, Turin, Milan, Konstanz and München. With all the challenges arising from such a large international group, this is a wonderful group to work with!

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