Nordic Unequal Childhood seeks to disseminate research results from a cross-national study on the organization of education and welfare in three Nordic countries, and to facilitate active collaboration between academic and municipal actors in order to promote equity and sustainability in welfare state policies. The project is based at the Department of Teacher Education and the Department of Sociology and Political Science at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The scientific basis of the project is provided by a comprehensive and interdisciplinary mixed-methods study of the economic, political and institutional conditions for children welfare and social inclusion in the Nordic welfare states. Results from this study will be disseminated at a number of planned conferences where researchers and municipal actors will collaborate actively in order to understand and change the organization of local welfare services. These conferences will provide strategic arenas for communicating research results and will also serve as platforms for connecting central actors responsible for local welfare services through knowledge and experience exchange.

The project will run between 2019 and 2024 and will result in both national and international scientific articles, reports and book projects ranging across a number of social scientific disciplines. Our primary aim is to produce and communicate high-quality social scientific research capable of informing political policy towards more equal and sustainable welfare societies. It is in the nature of such research that it seeks to address both the research community, as well as political actors, municipal workers, citizens and all others who are interested in education, welfare, social organization, social inequality and childhood. Our partners include municipal representatives from Trondheim, Norrköping and Tampere as well as a network of researchers across the Nordic countries. Specifically, the network includes researchers from NTNU Social Research Trondheim, CHAIN Trondheim, FAFO Oslo, University of California Berkeley California, University of Lucerne Switzerland, University of Leibniz Germany and Tampere University in Finland.