On January 19-20 2023, the MapIneq consortium held its first meeting at the beautiful Music House in Helsinki to kick off the ‘Mapping inequalities through the life course’ Horizon Europe project. Population Europe is one of the partners and leads the Work Package Dissemination and Stakeholder Dialogue.
The project coordinator, Jani Erola from the University of Turku, welcomed the 33 participants representing 8 institutions, and the members of the Advisory Board who joined both in person and online. Jani Erola remembered how the project first began to be conceived in the late spring of 2021 and was later submitted for evaluation in October. Daniela Vono de Vilhena quoted Jani’s words to frame the need to join efforts and apply to the Horizon Europe call. He said, “I think we kind of have a responsibility to apply when the topic is like this.”
During the meeting, Jani Erola presented a summary of the project for the members of the Advisory Board. This was followed by a presentation of the nine work packages in which the project is organised. The first one compiles, curates and distributes a unique open-access geo-located inequality database. Work packages 2 to 6 will study inequalities at different stages of the life course from early childhood, education and school-to-work transitions to mid-careers and labour market exits. The synthesis across the life course will come in WP7. Finally, in WP8 we aim to establish a dialogue with stakeholders and citizens to maximise the impact of the project.
Members of the Advisory Board provided feedback about the research plans. They also stressed the importance of one of the key MapIneq deliverables led by Melinda Mills and Douglas Leasure (University of Oxford): a geolocated database that focuses on providing sub-national indicators and the possibility of linking it to secondary databases to provide fine-grained insights about the drivers of social inequality trends.
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This article is based on this post, first published on the MapIneq website and is re-posted with many thanks. Author: Mijail Figueroa Gonzalez