Social Sciences and the Study of Family Fortunes in the Global Financial Crisis

This issue of Dialogue includes selected contributions from the 2010 ASSA Annual Symposium on 'Family Fortunes and the Global Financial Crisis: The consequences of an economic downturn for work, families and children'. This symposium was part of a wider ASSA project on the social consequences of the global financial crisis, which began in 2010 and will run until 2012. The project is cross-national in scope and hopes to uncover the human experience of this global recession in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The project will endeavour to trace the different course of events taken in these countries and explore the reasons behind these divergences. This article serves as an introduction to the project and to the material presented at the symposium.