Dear Colleagues,

As we near a full second year of a pandemic, both new and long-standing social issues have been brought into sharper focus. While privileged workers have had opportunities to transition from daily commutes to working from comfortable homes, those at the other end of the labour market lost jobs or faced daily risks of infection and the challenges of unsafe working conditions, hazardous commutes and insecure employment.

While social isolation has challenged all of us, for those confined to already inadequate housing, with small children and minimal income, these past months have posed unprecedented challenges. The effects on children, of interrupted schooling, pandemic-induced anxiety and loss of socialization opportunity, can be expected to be enduring.

More positively, we have witnessed in many parts of the globe renewed interventions by the state in supporting social welfare and widespread acknowledgement that the effects of COVID-19 have differentially impacted those who were already marginalized, yet we face an uncertain future in terms of lasting commitments to reduce growing social inequality.

This Special Issue invites contributions from across the globe to examine these issues through conceptual, theoretical and empirical papers. Contributions are welcomed that illuminate and elucidate our understandings of social inequality in low-income households in the context of a global crisis that has exacerbated inequality and perhaps raised hopes and demands for meaningful social change.

Dr. Lea Caragata
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Social Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• low-income
• COVID-19
• social inequality
• single mothers
• labour markets
• poverty