Abstract
Inclusion policies focusing on Roma groups started in Sweden during the 1950s, when the Swedish government recognized the formal citizen status of the so called “Swedish Gypsies”, a group consisting of approximately 740 people. As the Roma were perceived as people living outside the boundaries of normal society, the challenge facing the Swedish authorities was how to outline and organize the new policies. In our analyses we focus on the taken-for-granted premises of these policies. We discuss the “entry process” of these Roma into Swedish society. People-processing organizations classified Roma as “socially disabled” in different administrative contexts. In the early 1960s adult male Roma were classified as socially disabled on the labor market. Later during the same decade, experts and professionals increasingly focused attention on the Roma family as a problematic institution. In this context, Roma adults were classified as disabled in relation to the normative representations of parental capacities during that time, while Roma children of school age were defined as children with difficulties and put in special groups for children with problems. The related interventions were justified by a discourse on social inclusion, but in reality produced a web of measures, practices and yet further interventions, which in the long run have contributed to perpetuate the social marginality of Roma groups.
Highlights
In this article we focus on the period 1950 to 1970, i.e. the time when new Roma policies emerged in Sweden and were established within the welfare system
The experts engaged in the Gypsy Question after WWII were focusing on identifying the specific characteristics that made the Roma into disabled citizens, their alleged social disability was examined within different fields of expertise
Individuals identified as Swedish Roma were constituted as a special category of citizens, whom had all aspects of their lives examined and used as the basis for intervention by the authorities
Summary
In this article we focus on the period 1950 to 1970, i.e. the time when new Roma policies emerged in Sweden and were established within the welfare system. Gatekeepers at the local level such as social workers, public health staff and schoolteachers, i.e. street levels bureaucrats (in Lipsky’s terms), or frontline caseworkers (in Iacovetta’s terms), performed the routine work of ordering and processing Swedish Roma as welfare clients classified according to established criteria (age, health, family situations, etc.). In this way gatekeepers at both organizational/scientific and local levels were involved in shaping the politics of practice in processing Swedish Roma citizens. The empirical sources of this research consists of primary sources from various scientific and political-administrative contexts, including correspondence, working material and other written sources that reflect the daily work of experts and professionals in different scientific, institutional and administrative fields
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