Preliminary Programme

Wed 23 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 24 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 17.30

Fri 25 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 26 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 23 April 2014 11.00 - 13.00
ZB-2 POL12 Twentieth Century Citizenship Claims
Hörsaal 26 basement
Network: Politics, Citizenship, and Nations Chair: Virginie Roiron
Organizers: - Discussant: Virginie Roiron
Per Boberg : Organising Spaces for Interaction: Immigrant Actorship and the Development of Welfare Services to Accommodate Immigrants’ Needs in a Swedish Locality 1951-1991
The paper aims to investigate the development of immigrant-oriented welfare services and their functions as spaces for interaction between immigrants, other inhabitants, civil society and authorities in a Swedish locality. The area of investigation is the town and municipality of Katrineholm (circa 32 000 inhabitants, 1971-2001), due to its characteristics ... (Show more)
The paper aims to investigate the development of immigrant-oriented welfare services and their functions as spaces for interaction between immigrants, other inhabitants, civil society and authorities in a Swedish locality. The area of investigation is the town and municipality of Katrineholm (circa 32 000 inhabitants, 1971-2001), due to its characteristics as a destination for labour immigration during the 1950’s to 1970’s and refugee immigration during the 1980’s and onwards.

The following research questions are addressed: How did local authorities and civil society in Katrineholm organise welfare services over time to accommodate the needs of labour immigrants and refugees respectively? How did immigrants act individually and collectively in the locality to realise their ambitions concerning welfare-services? What mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion can be observed in the organisation of spaces for interaction between immigrants, other inhabitants, civil society and local authorities in this respect? How is the development in Katrineholm parallel to national immigrant policies and organisation of welfare services?

Previous studies in a Swedish context have focused mainly on how immigrant policies have “integrated” or “assimilated” immigrants in society, and less on individual and collective immigrant actorship situated within a framework of social relations and hegemonic structures where mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are formed, reinforced and dissolved. Furthermore, there has been a bias towards investigations of immigration and immigrant policies at the national level. Hence, the availability and accessibility of welfare services to immigrants in a locality is investigated diachronically from two angles: The work of local authorities and civil society to meet the needs of the immigrants, and the actions taken by immigrants to realise ambitions and safeguard rights concerning welfare services and benefits.

In this context, the local immigrant bureau (Invandrarbyrån) is of special interest, since it was responsible for assisting and coordinating activities concerning immigrants, implementing local immigrant policies through availability of interpreters, access to social services and enabling immigrants to communicate with local authorities, thus creating spaces for interaction between immigrants, other inhabitants and organisations.

This local context is related to a wider Swedish societal context in which national immigrant policies have developed. The source material consists of documents of communication between authorities, organisations and immigrants, and various written sources from the Invandrarbyrån and other local authorities.
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Kate Bradley : All Equal under the Law? The Media, the Legal Profession and Citizens’ Access to Legal Advice in Mid-twentieth Century Britain, c.1942-1965
Since the general election in 2010, the Coalition government in Britain has sought to reduce its debts through cutting back on welfare spending. One area which has been subject to these cuts is the legal aid budget, which will be reduced by 40 percent. This has re-drawn attention ... (Show more)
Since the general election in 2010, the Coalition government in Britain has sought to reduce its debts through cutting back on welfare spending. One area which has been subject to these cuts is the legal aid budget, which will be reduced by 40 percent. This has re-drawn attention to the need for all British citizens to be able to access legal advice and aid on an equitable basis, irrespective of their ability to pay. The Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949 in England and Wales and Legal Aid and Solicitors Act (Scotland) 1949 instituted free civil and criminal legal aid and advice as a vital part of the welfare state, whilst Northern Ireland acquired a scheme through the Legal Aid and Advice Act (Northern Ireland) 1965. The generosity of the mainland scheme was scaled back in the course of the 1950s, and the Northern Irish system was restricted in comparison to its original design. Prior to this, access for poorer citizens to the civil law was largely dependent upon the goodwill of the legal profession to volunteer their time and efforts, although there were other providers of advice and support – including charities and national newspapers. Pressures to change came from the liberalisation of divorce, recognition of how the growth of hire-purchase and other contracts impacted on people’s lives when problems arose, and through civilian and conscript experiences of legislation during the Second World War.

The focus of this paper is on the ‘grey area’ between the newspapers as the self-appointed voice of their reader-citizens, the reader-citizens themselves, business and the state during war and peacetime, in the broader context of understandings of citizenship and power in mid-twentieth century Britain. It will look specifically at the John Hilton Bureau of the News of the World, which provided both personal responses and published advice to readers’ questions in the newspaper. In doing so, it will explore the role that the mass media had to play not only in raising awareness of the rights and responsibilities of citizens, but also in directly providing readily accessible advice to the public, both before and after the introduction of legislation in this area. It will also identify the advantages and problems inherent in a profit-making business, such as a newspaper, being involved in supporting a social service. This paper will contribute to our understanding of the longer development of legal aid and advice in Britain, and placing it within broader historical discussions about citizenship and welfare from the 1940s onwards. (Show less)

Ida Ohlsson Al Fakir : Gatekeeping Spaces - Grey Areas in the Shaping of New Swedish Citizens
My paper will discuss the grey area that was established between the Swedish state and a small group of Roma residents in Sweden after the Second World War. I conceptualise this area as a gatekeeping space, where political subjects (officials and professionals, and Roma as well as non-Roma) claimed and/or ... (Show more)
My paper will discuss the grey area that was established between the Swedish state and a small group of Roma residents in Sweden after the Second World War. I conceptualise this area as a gatekeeping space, where political subjects (officials and professionals, and Roma as well as non-Roma) claimed and/or produced citizenship and citizens through inventing and contesting classifications, categorisations, examinations, etc. I thus presume that the boundaries and positions of social groups and categories are relational, overlapping, fluid, contingent, dynamic and reversible.

Parting from Engin F. Isin’s notion of citizenship as an ontological state – a way of ’being political’ – rather than simply a (conditioned) bundle of rights and responsibilities through membership (in a nation state), I explore the shaping of new citizens in Sweden during the post-war period. According to Isin, citizenship cannot be studied without its alterity; citizenship (citizens) and ‘otherness’ (strangers/outsiders) constitute each other and emerges simultaneously in a dialogical, yet often conflict-ridden, manner. The methodological consequences given by Isin’s theories indicate a focus on the strategies and technologies (i.e. acts) that constitute citizens.

More specifically, my paper concerns the Gypsies classified as Swedish citizens in the 1950s and subsequently approached as a new ‘citizenship project’ (Rose & Novas “Biological Citizenship”, 2002, p. 1). The citizenship project of the Swedish Gypsies was preceded, shaped and mediated by the socio-medical Gypsy Examination in the 1960s. Citizenship projects, argue Rose and Novas, have often been framed in biological terms of race, bloodlines, stock, intelligence, health and disability. This is confirmed in historian Amy L. Fairchild’s study of immigrant medical inspections at U.S. ports of entry during the era of mass migration around 1900 (Fairchild, 2003). Fairchild, questioning conventional emphasis on the exclusionary functions of medical inspections, describes them as an inclusionary tool in that they disciplined immigrants according to certain norms and expectations, and provided the American industry with labour power.

Similar to Fairchild, I approach the socio-medical Gypsy Examination as an (administrative, scientific, practical) instrument in the shaping of new citizens. The Examination served to identify suitable citizenship for Swedish Gypsies, whether they were fit for industrial citizenship and/or had the requested capacities for civic citizenship. It also had a transitional quality in the way it determined individual Gypsies’ place in society and proposed interventions that supposedly would place them there. The manner in which the socio-medical team organised the Examination, i.e. the diseases/conditions that were considered, the diagnostic technologies that were used and the physical and mental spaces that were created to manage bodies, conveyed certain meanings. My paper, then, will focus on these meanings through an investigation of the structure, practical routines and contents of the Gypsy Examination. The results will illuminate the function of social medicine in the making of public policy, and hopefully also tell us something about how historically specific forms of citizenship have been constituted in and through creative micro-level acts.
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