Backing Seven Early-career Researchers to Reimagine the Social Contract for a Fairer Future
Demographic shifts, rising inequalities, and emerging risks such as climate change and technological disruption challenge traditional models of social protection. These issues call for innovative approaches to organizing rights, responsibilities, and mutual support within societies.
As part of our commitment to strengthening social resilience and solidarity through science, the AXA Foundation for Human Progress is supporting cutting-edge postdoctoral research under the theme “Rethinking the Social Contract: Demographic Change, Social Protection, and Solidarity.”
The aim of this fellowship program is to generate new knowledge and actionable insights that help individuals and communities better manage risks, build resilience, and reinforce trust, protection, and solidarity.
The call generated strong interest, and at the end of the process selection, seven exceptional early-career researchers (within five years of their PhD) were chosen based on academic excellence, project innovation, and outreach capacity.
Generating Practical Solutions for a Better Society
This Fellowship aims to deliver concrete insights on how the social contract must evolve to support a more resilient, fair, and sustainable society. It promotes interdisciplinary, solution-driven research capable of providing actionable recommendations for policymakers, institutions, and communities.
Generating Practical Solutions for a Better Society
This initiative aims to deliver concrete insights on how the social contract must evolve to support a resilient, fair, and sustainable society. It promotes interdisciplinary, solution-driven research capable of providing actionable recommendations for policymakers, institutions, and communities.
The selected projects explore key issues such as demographic change and aging societies, migration and shifting population dynamics, evolving labor markets and new work models, social protection systems and safety nets, inclusive, and adaptable social contracts in the face of interconnected risks.
Discover the Supported Projects
Dr Martina Bovo, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
Migration Urban Policy for a New Social Contract in Southern Italy
Dr Bovo’s project explores how recent migration has reshaped daily life, governance, and social cohesion in European cities, with a focus on precarious living conditions in Southern peripheries. Using the town of Castel Volturno in Southern Italy as a case study, her team will map migrants’ living conditions, identify all key integration actors (from public institutions to grassroots organizations) and analyze how they interact. Working directly with local stakeholders, the project will co-produce practical conditions and tools for more inclusive, place-based policies that reflect real needs and intersectional inequalities. The findings will be scaled up into policy‑oriented knowledge, helping to strengthen the link between research, public debate and decision‑making on migration and urban governance.
Dr Mario Bernasconi, University of Basel (Switzerland)
Demographic Shifts and Policy Responses
This project examines how ageing populations and shrinking workforces are reshaping social protection and the behavior of older workers, focusing on pension and unemployment insurance reforms.
A first strand looks at partial retirement: using rich Dutch administrative data and natural experiments created by pension reforms, Dr Bernasconi will estimate how flexible retirement options affect when and how people leave work, then use a structural life‑cycle model to simulate alternative policy designs. A second strand analyses a German reform of unemployment insurance (UI) that reduced benefit duration but was announced in advance, prompting many older workers to leave employment early to lock in more generous pre‑reform benefits.
Dr Oa Akua Konadu-Osei, Maastricht University (Netherlands)
Beyond Borders and Precarity: A Transnational Social Contract for Gig Work
Dr Konadu-Osei's aim is to explore how transnational gig work is transforming the social contract between firms in high‑income countries and gig workers in low‑ and middle‑income countries. Focusing on platforms and hiring organizations in the Global North and workers in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, her project examines weak regulation, heightened precarity, and limited worker voice. Combining policy analysis, surveys, interviews, and co‑creation workshops, the research seeks to outline what a fair transnational social contract for gig work could be and how platforms can adopt more inclusive practices that support long‑term socio‑economic resilience.
Dr Trang Le, University of New South Wales (Australia)
Fertility, Education, and Evolving Social Contract in Developing Countries
This research examines how rapid demographic change in emerging economies is transforming the “old deal” between generations, and what that implies for social protection and public policy.
Focusing on Indonesia, with extensions to Vietnam and Thailand, Dr Le develops a structural life‑cycle model in which children are treated as informal old‑age insurance, and households choose fertility and education under income risk, borrowing constraints, informality and changing expectations of support. Using rich panel data (IFLS and comparable surveys), the project quantifies how weakening norms of filial support affect decisions about family size and human capital investment, and simulates how social pensions, education subsidies and other policies could offset rising vulnerability, inequality and immobility.
Dr Lara Schwarz, University of California, Berkeley (United States of America)
Climate Resilience as Social Responsibility: Protecting Health in Extreme Weather
Evaluating how well public climate adaptation measures, such as cooling and clean air centers, this project aims to protect unhoused people, who are among the most exposed to extreme heat and wildfire smoke.
Building on earlier findings from San Diego that showed higher climate‑related health impacts in unhoused populations, it expands the analysis to major cities across California using seven years of hospital and emergency department data. By linking heat and smoke exposure to health outcomes and assessing the effectiveness and cost‑effectiveness of these interventions, Dr Schwarz will provide thanks to her research robust evidence to design more targeted, equitable, and protective climate policies in California and beyond.
Dr Lauren Stuart, University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)
Health, Work, and Change: A New Social Contract for Youth
Dr Stuart’s project tests whether youth‑led community health programs can jointly improve health, create jobs, and strengthen social cohesion in low‑income urban areas.
In Soweto and Alexandra, 100 unemployed young people will provide monthly blood pressure screenings to 100 older adults over six months, while researchers track health outcomes for elders and mental, economic and employment outcomes for youth. An economic analysis will assess the sustainability and scalability of this model, aiming to inform policies that link youth employment with chronic disease management in South Africa and similar contexts.
Dr Laurence Anthony Go, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)
Institutions and Migration: Allocation, Cohesion, and Transformation (IMPACT)
This research examines how migration reshapes core institutions and, in turn, how those institutions shape migrants’ impacts on host societies. Through three subprojects on labor market rules in Spain, national identity rituals across countries, and a naturalization reform in the Philippines, Dr Go will analyze how resource allocation, social cohesion and development policies can be designed to turn migration into a driver of fair and inclusive long‑term growth.
We believe that supporting independent, high-quality research is essential to anticipating future challenges and designing more inclusive protection frameworks. By backing these seven postdoctoral researchers, we aim to contribute to a renewed vision of the social contract: one that better equips societies to navigate uncertainty, reduce inequalities, and strengthen solidarity for generations to come.