Biopolitics, care and the transformations of a large institution for children with disabilities in Romania from 1956 to 2015

ABSTRACT

This paper connects research on deinstitutionalization as a dominant paradigm in service provision for children and adults with disabilities to the research on transformations from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism in a long durée perspective. It focuses on the transformations of care practices and infrastructures in terms of biopolitical shifts. By building on ethnographic fieldwork surrounding a now closed neuropsychiatric hospital for children in Romania, interviews and informal conversations with formerly institutionalized children from the institution, carers, professionals and volunteers, it traces both the transformations of the institution and its follow-up services from the 1950s to 2015, as well as the practices prevalent in these institutions and the ways in which these reflected dominant moral and political orders and how they were enacted in everyday life. It concludes that although biopolitical infrastructures and practices have changed greatly during the period under study, continuities can be observed in the ways in which productivist logics still work to exclude as well as include people with disabilities – thus perpetuating practices of hierarchization in relation to social inclusion based on economic criteria. Moreover, biopolitical shifts were not linear, but involved contradictory movements and logics, and entanglements of multiple transformation processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Multiple transformations
• care
• disability
• biopolitics
• deinstitutionalization
• productivism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the generous interview partners who shared their time and experiences with me, as well Viola Zentai, Prem Kumar Rajaram, John Clarke, Paul Stubbs, Dvora Yanow and Tania Murray Li for feedback on earlier drafts of ideas presented here. And Maren Hachmeister, Katherine Bird and two anonymous reviewers for help in developing the arguments further.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This publication was created in the framework of the research project “Multiple Transformations. Social Experiences and Cultural Change in East Germany and East Central Europe before and after 1989” (2020-2022), supported by the Saxon State Ministry for Higher Education, Research, Culture and Tourism (SMWK). The endeavour was financed through tax resources in accordance with the budget adopted by the parliament of Saxony. The present paper is based on the author’s PhD dissertation submitted to Central European University Budapest in 2018 supported by several research grants of the Central European University Foundation Budapest, as well as subsequent research work conducted during a New Europe College Fellowship supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation, CNCS/CCCDI – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-BSO-2016-003, within PNCDI III.

Notes on contributors

Leyla Safta-Zecheria

Leyla Safta-Zecheria is an anthropologist and a pedagogist. She holds a PhD in Political Science/Public Policy from Central European University Budapest and an MA in European Ethnology from Humboldt University Berlin. She is a lecturer at the Educational Sciences Department, an affiliate of the University Clinic for Psychopedagogical Therapies and Counselling, West University of Timișoara and a Research Affiliate at the Democracy Institute at Central European University Budapest. Her research interests include critical policy studies, disability, care, memory, youth, as well as participatory and visual research methods.