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This paper explores the constitution of a moral economy of welfare through acts of benefit fraud. The structural conditions of contemporary labour, citizenship, and migration regimes in Europe exclude large shares of workers from access to social citizenship and place them in a position of undeserving trespassers of the social contract. Drawing on the case of Bulgarian Roma engaged in precarious labour and short-term intensive mobility between Bulgaria and the Netherlands, I show how labour conditions in both countries and the structures of the welfare regimes effectively exclude them from access to social citizenship and confine them to the realms of informal work, thus putting them in a position of differential inclusion. The benefit fraud in this context has multiple interpretations—ranging from crime through a survival strategy to a claim to social justice. By mobilizing the idea of the moral economy of welfare, I seek to explain how migrants justify their actions not as transgression, but as a claim to social citizenship and a critique of an unjust social and economic order. In a moral economy of welfare, the migrants see themselves as deserving state support both by virtue of being citizens and of being good workers. Being excluded from proper welfare support is interpreted as a failure of both states. In this context, the fraud is framed in moral terms as an act of citizenship aiming to restore justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the different meanings behind the narratives of "family," "childcare," and "child protection" in public discourses against the National Strategy for the Child (NSC) 2019–2030 in Bulgaria. These meanings are seen as reflecting the intertwining and cumulative effects of transnational and local influences in the anti-gender movement. Using frame analysis as an approach in social movement studies, the aim is to analyse the main ideas of NSC opponents—conservative far-right non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and citizens who joined the discussion during the public debate on the Strategy in January 2019. We differentiate between the discourses of the NGOs and the critical citizens, paying attention to the way they use the narrative of return—return to traditional family forms and child-rearing models. The conservative NGOs declared themselves to be defenders of Bulgarian children and families against the liberal policies of the European Union (EU) and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lobbies. The citizens' discourse is directed against the child-centred philosophy of the Strategy, seen as a threat to both the children themselves and parents' rights, but it rarely mentions LGBT and gendering as a danger. The discussion revealed the deep distrust of citizens and parents towards the state and its institutions, which was amplified and instrumentalized by the far-right NGOs who mobilized and organized a mass social movement against the Strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores shifts in workplace festivities in Bulgaria as part of the transition from socialism to post-socialism and analyses how work celebrations are used to express and uphold the moral economies informing them. During the socialist period, labour was glorified and work celebrations were a key instrument in the ideological and cultural engineering efforts of the state. Since the 1990s, private business owners have been reinterpreting and (re-)inventing festive traditions to stage their identities and moral orientations in discursive and performative ways. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation in industrial production and high-tech companies from 2017 to 2019, I argue that highly mediated company celebrations are, in the wake of promotional cultures, an opportunity for employers to brand themselves as "good." Such events also model the expectations of a "good employee," for example, to be competitive not only regarding one's work but also in having fun, as part of work, which is a reflection of the general insistence on happiness in the neoliberal workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]