The summer conference season 2021 opened for me with this year’s annual conference of the Refugee Law Initiative, ‘Ageing Gracefully? The 1951 Refugee Convention at 70‘. What a splendid event, with an enormous variety of speakers from all parts of the world, inspiring keynotes and in-depth discussions! I was happy and proud to take actively part by presenting a paper on “Different systems, similar responses: Recent policy reforms on asylum seekers’ and refugees’ access to health care in Germany and Sweden“.
July and September, respectively, took me to two ECPR conferences: first to the biannual conference of the ECPR Standing Group on Parliaments, where I discussed some first insights on “Governmental responsibility + crisis > ideology? Social Democratic party politics in reaction to the ‘migration crisis’ in Germany and Sweden“; and then to the ECPR General Conference 2021, where I presented two further papers deriving from my current research on the political regulation and politicisation of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ access to health care across Europe.
The season’s final conference (for me) was organised by one of my favourite academic networks, namely: the UACES Annual Conference 2021. In addition to another presentation on my above-mentioned research (as part of a panel hosted by the wonderful EU Health Governance Network), I organised a non-traditional panel on the theme “Who asked you anyway?! – Unintended shapers of European social policy“. In a small but very engaged round, we discussed patterns and strategies underlying very different actors’ attempts at influencing the EU’s social dimension, at the supra- and national as well as sub-national level.