Richard Carrère

I am a PhD student supervised Prof. Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe and Prof. Eva Van Belle, funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) through a fellowship fundamental research (aspirant) "From blue collar to no collar? Understanding joblessness as a class position across Europe".

My work focuses on social class and stratification, with particular interest in how unemployment and broader forms of joblessness can be understood through the analytical lens of social class. I aim to theorize the position of people without paid employment in contemporary market societies and to develop a broader framework for conceptualizing power within the labour ‘market’ – a dimension insufficiently addressed by orthodox economic thought.  

Empirically, I mainly use European (longitudinal) survey data to examine, for instance, how job loss relates to health outcomes and material deprivation: I am interested in how this relation might differ across welfare arrangements, activation regimes and cultural embeddings. I also study how activation policies affect the quality of re-employment.  

Beyond this, I am interested in theoretical work on social class and maintain broad interest in economic sociology, political economy, the philosophy of social sciences and causal inference.