What are the key challenges of welfare states of the future? In a world of limited resources, what should our priority be? To close the LSE Festival, we will pit Beveridge's "five giants" (reimagined as the giant issues of housing and urbanisation, education and skills, health and social care, the future of work and the challenges of poverty), as well as sustainability, the missing sixth Giant voted for by you, against each other in a battle to decide which is the biggest issue now and in the near future.

Adura Banke-Thomas is LSE fellow in Health Policy. He is also a research fellow at the Centre for Reproductive Health Research and Innovation, Lagos State University, Nigeria and a fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, Washington DC, USA. His current research focuses on using value-for–money assessments, economic evaluations, policy analyses, and geographic information systems to better inform investments and planning for maternal and newborn health in low- and middle-income countries. Adura is a medical doctor by background and completed his PhD in International Public Health at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine/University of Liverpool.

Tania Burchardt is Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) and an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy at LSE. Tania’s research interests lie in theories of justice, including the capability approach, measurement of inequality and applied welfare policy analysis. She has held research grants from the British Academy, ESRC, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Nuffield Foundation and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and, with Polly Vizard, has led the programme of research on capability, equality and human rights within CASE. 

Tammy Campbell (@_TammyCampbell) is based in the LSE’s Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, and is a (mainly) quantitative researcher. She completed her PhD at the UCL Institute of Education, focussing on structural and psychological factors creating difference among primary school pupils, and was previously a Government Social Researcher in the Department for Education. Before that, she worked with children and young people, in London, Japan, and Norway. Tammy’s current research interests include: inequalities in pre-school education, month of birth effects, stereotyping and bias in perceptions of pupils, ‘ability’-grouping, and factors influencing breastfeeding. Further information on publications related to these topics.

Rebecca Elliott (@RebsFE) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at LSE. Her research interests span economic sociology, political sociology, environmental sociology, and knowledge production and science studies. She is particularly interested in how the environmental impacts of climate change are confronted as economic problems. 

Kathleen Scanlon (@KathJScanlon) is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at LSE London. She has a wide range of research interests including comparative housing policy (across all tenures–social and private rented housing as well as owner-occupation), comparative mortgage finance, and migration. Since 2015 she has focused on ways of accelerating new housing development in London, looking at a range of solutions from cohousing and other collaborative approaches to the potential of large-scale private rented schemes. She recently edited an authoritative book on Social Housing in Europe (Wiley, 2014).

Jamie Woodcock (@jamie_woodcock) is a Fellow at LSE and author of Working The Phones, a study of a call centre in the UK inspired by the workers' inquiry. His current research involves developing this method in co-research projects with Deliveroo drivers and other digital workers in the so-called gig economy. He is on the editorial board of Historical Materialism. His current research focuses on digital labour, the sociology of work, the gig economy, resistance, and videogames. He has previously worked as a postdoc on a research project about videogames, as well as another on the crowdsourcing of citizen science. Jamie completed his PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and has held positions at Goldsmiths, University of Leeds, University of Manchester, Queen Mary, NYU London, and Cass Business School.

Minouche Shafik is Director of LSE. Prior to this she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.

Twitter hashtags for this event: #LSEBeveridge #LSEFestival

This is the closing event of the LSE Festival: Beveridge 2.0 running from Monday 19 to Saturday 24 February 2018, with a series of events rethinking the welfare state for the 21st century and the global context.

Podcast & Video

A podcast and video of this event are available to download from The Giants of 2020.

Podcasts and videos of many LSE events can be found at the LSE Public Lectures and Events: podcasts and videos channel.