Gymnastik- och idrottshögskolan, GIH

Historically, social welfare providers have defined social and ethnic minorities such as ‘vagrants’ and Romani people as non-deserving and thus excluded them from their work. Gradually during the nineteenth century, however, Christian actors and organizations across Europe were among the first to recognize Romani groups as legitimate targets of relief. The operations required boundary changes where previously undeserving categories were transferred to deserving, thus becoming legitimate targets of relief. The article discusses the Church of Sweden’s social care for minorities, with a special focus on Romani groups from the 1910s to the 1940s. At that point, Protestant social work was permeated by conservative paternalism and focused on changing the individual through interventions defined as help-to-self-help, rather than challenging the unjust social structures in Swedish society. However, welfare measures were enacted differently depending on the majority/minority position of the individual; the recognition or rejection of minority rights affected the distribution and content of Lutheran social welfare. Examining church-led or church-endorsed activities, the contribution sheds light on the differentiation of social and ethnic subgroups and brings nuance to a field that has overlooked the Swedish state church as a welfare provider in the twentieth century. The instances of intersection between and sometimes confusion of social and ethnic boundaries serve as examples of the historicity of such boundaries and churchmen’s contribution to establishing these.

The article examines how people within the Church of Sweden’s leadership tried to solve ‘the problem of vagrancy’ in Sweden in the early twentieth century. In focus are the priest John Melander and the deacon Josef Flinth, who advocated and realized various activities for categories of poor and mobile men in the population. These interventions, defined as help-to-self-help, differentiated between the ‘worthy’ and the ‘unworthy’ needy. In publications and lectures, Melander and Flinth presented arguments to transfer ‘unworthy’ categories to the ‘worthy’, thereby expanding the community of value. This expansion was conditioned, however, by boundaries drawn regarding ideas on belonging and ethnicity. Working in the borderlands of the community as part of a Christian calling, Melander and Flinth contributed to the expansion of social work in the early twentieth century.

The 1945 census was the last to record ethnicity in Sweden, and in 1973, registering ethnicity became virtually illegal. Swedish population statistics and official health and social registers therefore do not contain information on the ethnic background of the people registered. Exploring socio-medical and epidemiological research in Sweden from the 1940s to the 1980s, the chapter discusses the tension between ethical and legal constraints on the one hand, and the scientific, administrative, and political need for accurate information on minority and ethnic groups on the other. Three alternative research strategies to substitute for the lack of data on ethnicity are identified: using alternative but related categories such as nationality, country of birth, or immigrant status; “reading ethnicity” from pre-existing data collections; and conducting time-consuming and costly special studies designed to enable researchers to bypass the proscription of ethnic registration. These strategies have produced new epidemiological and socio-medical understandings concerning ethnicity and health/disease. However, as certain groups and categories have been statistically more available or visible in society than others, an uneven body of knowledge has evolved. In effect, some minorities have been spotlighted while others have remained hidden in plain sight.

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.

Socialläkaren John Takman var vid sidan av bl a Katarina Taikon en av förgrundsfigurerna i kampen för romers medborgerliga rättigheter under 1960-talet. Han upprördes över samhällets likgiltighet och underströk att ohälsa och fattigdom var såväl resultat av som orsak bakom romernas situation.

This thesis investigates Zigenarundersökningen [the Gypsy study] – a socio-medical study of Swedish Roma conducted in 1962-1965. The Study was financed by the National Labour Market Board, which sought scientific information on every adult Roma citizen in order to plan for targeted authority interventions. The socio-medical team used a number of different medical and social techniques, drawing together different kinds of data – from the molecular to the social level – and adding “objective” records from public institutions, which resulted in the creation of detailed and voluminous individual case files. On the basis of these files, the public health specialist John Takman in charge of the socio-medical examinations formulated a professional opinion on each individual and family. During the execution of the study, new scientific and social questions were articulated, resulting in that the originally limited investigation concerning only a smaller group of Roma citizens evolved into a comprehensive research project covering all people identified as Swedish Roma. In this thesis, this expansion is analysed using methodological tools from Science and Technology Studies that focus on the reflexivity between the goals of scientific actors, and the social conditions and problematisations that surround them. In this way, science and policy mutually influence each other in situated practices, which also involves the drawing of scientific boundaries that serve to establish epistemic authority.

Departing from Engin F. Isin’s theory on social citizenship, and its alterities, as constituted in contingent and contextualised social practices, and from Franca Iacovetta’s study of Canadian gatekeepers’ work in cold-war Canada, the thesis investigates how the, with time, increasing and more comprehensive activities of experts and professionals created new dimensions of citizenship. Against this background, the thesis draws the conclusion that the scientific-political examinations of problematised citizenship and citizens in Sweden in the 1960’s, while defining deviance, also defined normality. This implies, furthermore, that scientific measurements and classifications of alterity contributed to constituting those measuring and classifying – the experts and professionals – as virtuous citizens, in accordance with contemporary norms of professionalism and expertise, while the Roma were continually constructed as problematic citizens. Hence, scientific-political activities concerning Swedish Roma in the 1960’s created new spaces of social citizenship, where the contents of both normality and deviance were nuanced and (re)defined. 

The article deals with the notion of purity and its relation to Good Citizenship and the development of Roma policies in Sweden during the twentieth century. The case of the differentiation between "zigenare" and "tattare" is presented as an example of how ideas about purity informed processes of categorization, inclusion, and exclusion during the formative and expansive years of the Swedish welfare state. The medical sciences had a dominant role in these processes. Examining and defining "pure zigenare" was one of the ways in which experts would differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate Romanies– or Tolerated and Failed Citizens–in the post-war period. These differentiations had real and lasting consequences as they worked to support certain Romani groups while ignoring others, all of which are today included in the Swedish national Roma minority.

Artikeln diskuterar den svenska politiken gentemot romer under 1900-talet. En politik som tydligt illustrerar de villkor som gäller för att räknas som en del av befolkningen, samt vilka strategier som har använts för att omvandla de nya medlemmarna till nyttiga medborgare. I dessa processer har romer inordnats i såväl exkluderande som inkluderande kategorier, såsom lösdrivare, oönskade utlänningar och tiggare respektive medborgare, flyktingar och invandrare. Oavsett politikens målsättning har den dock legitimerats utifrån en gammal, och alltjämt reproducerad, berättelse om romer som en unik och problematisk grupp. I artikeln kombineras historiografiska perspektiv som under lång tid var åtskilda i romska studier, migrationshistoria och välfärdshistoria, med syftet att inordna romers historia i dessa breda fält. Framställningens tyngdpunkt ligger i perioden då denna politik fick fotfäste i Sverige: 1960- och 1970-talet.