Appel à participation : Welfare and the domestic space

Welfare and the domestic space - Housing and health in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean

 

Since the 19^th century, providing housing and inspecting dwellings for health reasons has become a domain of action for both public and private actors of welfare. Despite extensive literature on the history of social housing in Western European and Northern American cities, scholars have rarely observed the impact of welfare on the domestic sphere. Moreover, in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean, a geographical area marked by clashing imperial formations, with an important ethno-religious diversity, competing nationalisms and political regimes, massive human displacements and rural-to-urban migrations, housing provision appears as a fundamental yet overlooked part of social protection. This workshop will explore why and how the State and associations, as well as international actors, have intervened on housing from the 19^th to the early 21^st centuries in this region. We will try to identify the sources that could help address these questions, frame the geographical scope of the issue and highlight the historical moments of reconfiguration, from Ottoman rule to the post-war breakup of Empires and the contemporary era. 

 

 

Interventions in the domain of housing, including through welfare policies, are shaped by social norms of class and gender as well as by ethno-confessional demarcations. These have led either to the prescription of specific practices within specific households or to the categorization of some residential areas as threatening for the rest of the city. If the moralisation of impoverished areas is a well-known aspect of charitable or welfare initiatives, the interactions between the providers and recipients when it comes to housing have been studied in lesser depth. This workshop will thus explore the collaboration, compliance, resistance, claiming of rights of aid recipients, which could help to bring nuance to a too often top-down narrative on social housing. By varying the scales and tools of analysis in order to integrate space –be it urban or domestic – as a heuristic analytical category, we also hope to better grasp the process and effects of the mixed economy of welfare, within each historical context. Our first workshop will revolve around three themes which are of key importance to the study of housing, welfare, and health in the region: 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagining and building social housing 

 

 

First, actors involved in welfare applied their visions for housing by developing projects for a specifically addressed population from various social backgrounds. In the Ottoman Empire, charity providers had administered spaces in which ‘transient’ or ‘vagrant’ populations could temporarily stay since the early modern era. Turning to the 19^thcentury, did these practices aiming at controlling mobility give way to new projects of social housing? If so, how were they different, and what role could new conceptions of health and hygiene have played in such a process? Additionally, how did housing projects and models of housing circulate transnationally, and to what extent might we challenge a diffusionist conception of transnational circulations by examining local projects that became models for foreign actors? Finally, when did the State start becoming the driving actor of housing projects, and within the state apparatus, how did specific institutions gain prominence thanks to the housing question? We particularly invite contributions from participants who study housing projects at the ground-level, whether they materialized or not.  

 

 

 

 

 

Scales of danger: housing and the construction of risk

 

 

Second, welfare policies in cities of the region led to specific forms of housing and/or entire neighbourhoods being designated as particularly risk-inducing, both on sanitary and moral grounds and in terms of public order. This labelling was not only operated by public institutions but co-produced with other actors of the mixed economy of welfare, especially the ones engaged in health. How did these various actors interact, ignore, or oppose each other in the field of welfare? What importance did they give to the prevention of diseases compared to morality and public order? In a particularly plural environment, and in the context of the construction of post-imperial or post-colonial nation-states, to what extent did these issues contribute to the stigmatisation or incorporation of certain populations? What were the possibilities for resisting, contesting, or negotiating these labels by the populations inhabiting these areas?

 

 

 

 

 

Prescribing and negotiating the domestic space

 

 

Finally, these welfare practices were also characterized by the entrance of different actors, such as visiting nurses or social workers, in the domestic space. What forms of personal relations between welfare providers and recipients allowed the State or other organizations to penetrate or not into the intimacy of the home? As the Ottoman Empire was a favoured destination for humanitarian aid, and the post-Ottoman space a site of action for various transnational organizations and UN agencies, to what extent were international actors able to intervene on the domestic sphere as well? What prescriptions on habitat and hygiene came with these interventions, and to what extent did they have an impact on domestic practices? Finally, how did these actions shape the definition and boundaries of the domestic sphere of societies of the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean? 

 

 

 

 

 

Within the COST action program ‘Who Cares in Europe?’, this workshop invites to take a careful look at the local, and even domestic, environment where welfare and health are entangled. To help framing the geographical scope of the issue, this first workshop also welcomes presentations on other areas facing similar questions.

 

 

The workshop will take place at the Institut français d’études anatoliennes (IFEA), Istanbul on October 14^th-15^th 2022. 

 

 

To participate in this initial workshop, please send an abstract of maximum 300 words, including a short biographical note, before August 1^st to lea.delmaire@sciencespo.fr. 

 

 

 

 

 

Organizers: 

 

 

Lea Delmaire (Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po, IFEA)

 

 

Gabriel Doyle (Sciences Po, CETOBaC/EHESS)

 

 

 

 

 

Indicative bibliography: 

 

 

Adam, Thomas. Buying Respectability Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Chapter 2: “Heavy Luggage: the Intercultural Transfer of Models for Social Housing Enterprises”: 39-88. 

 

 

Adams, Annmarie. Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. 

 

 

Akalın, Mehmet. ‘Sosyal Konutların Türki̇ye’ni̇n Konut Poli̇ti̇kaları İçeri̇si̇ndeki̇ Yeri̇ Ve Toki̇’ni̇n Sosyal Konut Uygulamaları’. Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 26, 1 (2016): 10724.

 

 

Allen, Ryan and Van Riper, David. ‘The New Deal, the Deserving Poor, and the First Public Housing Residents in New York City’, Social Science History, ed 2020, p. 91115.

 

 

Bourdieu, Pierre and Rosine Christin. « La Construction du marché : Le champ administratif et la production de la “politique du logement ». Actes de La Recherche En Sciences Sociales n° 81-82, 1 (1990): 65–85. 

 

 

Bonner, Michael, Mine Ener and Amy Singer (ed.). Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts. New York, SUNY Press, 2003. 

 

 

Baudouï, Rémi and Yves Cohen (dir.). Les chantiers de la paix sociale : 1900-1940, Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, ENS, 1995.

 

 

Buğra, Ayşe. Kapitalizm, Yoksulluk ve Türkiye’de Sosyal Politika. İstanbul: İletişim, 2008. 

 

 

Cottereau, Alain. « La tuberculose: maladie urbaine ou maladie de l’usure au travail ? Critique d’une épidémiologie officielle : le cas de Paris ». Sociologie du travail, 20, 2 (1978): 192–224. 

 

 

Erman, Tahire. ‘Gecekondu Çalışmalarında ’Öteki’ Olarak Gecekondulu Kurguları’. European Journal of Turkish Studies. Social Sciences on Contemporary Turkey, 1 (2004)

 

 

Evered, Emine Ö. and Kyle T. Evered, ‘Dispensary, home, and ‘a women’s army’: Framing tubercular geographies and gender in late Ottoman Turkey’. Journal of Historical Geography, n°68, April 2020: 33-43. 

 

 

Fassin, Didier and Anne-Jeanne Naudé. ‘Plumbism Reinvented: Childhood Lead Poisoning in France, 1985-1990’. American Journal of Public Health 94, 11 (2004): 1854–63.

 

 

Ferrerra, Maurizio, ‘The southern model of welfare in social Europe’. Journal of European Social Policy, Vol. 6, n°1, 1996, 17-37. 

 

 

Feldberg, Georgina. Disease and Class. Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society. New Brunswick, USA: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

 

 

Fijalkow, Yankel. La construction des îlots insalubres : Paris 1850-1945. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998.

 

 

Foucault, Michel, Jean-Marie Alliaume, Blandine Barret-Kriegel, François Beguin, Danielle Rancière and Anne Thalamy. Politiques de l’habitat (1800-1850). Collège de France, 1977. 

 

 

Frouard, Hélène. Du coron au HLM : patronat et logement social, 1894-1953, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008.

 

 

Giomi, Fabio, Célia Keren, and Morgane Labbé (ed.). Public and Private Welfare in Modern Europe: Productive Entanglements. London, Routledge, 2022. 

 

 

Hamadeh, Shirine. ‘Invisible City: Istanbul’s migrants and the Politics of Space’. Eighteenth Century Studies, 50 (2) :173-193. 

 

 

House, Jim. ‘Intervening on “Problem” Areas and Their Inhabitants’. Histoire & Mesure XXXIV, no. 1 (December 2019): 121–50. 

 

 

Ineichen, Bernard. Homes and Health: How Housing and Health Interact. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 1993. 

 

 

Kontorgiorgi, Elisabeth. Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: The Rural Settlement of Refugees 1922-1930. Oxford Historical Monographs, Clarendon Press Oxford, 2006. 

 

 

Léobal, Clémence. ‘Les couleurs du logement social’. Terrains & travaux 39, 2 (2021): 61–86.

 

 

Levenstein, Lisa. A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

 

 

Lopez, Russel. Building American Public Health: Urban Planning, Architecture, and the Quest for Better Health in the United States. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 

 

 

Özden, Barış Alp. ‘Health, morality and housing: The politics of working class housing in Turkey, 1945-1960’. New Perspectives on Turkey, n^o 49 (2013): 91120.

 

 

Pérouse, Jean-François. ‘The State without the Public: Some Conjectures about the Administration for Collective Housing (TOKİ), in Aymes, Marc, Massicard, Elise and Gourisse, Benjamin (ed.), Order and Compromise: Government Practices in Turkey from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Early 21st Century. Leiden, Brill, 2015: 169–191.

 

 

Petrungaro, Stefano. ‘Hostels for Jobless Workers in Interwar Yugoslavia’. International Review of Social History 59, 3 (2014): 443-471.

 

 

Renzoni, Cristina. ‘Spatial Legacies of the Welfare State: Housing and Beyond’. Contemporary European History 22, no. 3 (2013): 537–46.

 

 

Schulz, Günther, ed. Wohnungspolitik im Sozialstaat: Deutsche und Europäische Lösungen 1918-1960. Düsseldorf, Droste Verlag, 1992.

 

 

Shapiro Ann-Louise. Housing the poor of Paris, 1850-1902. Madison ; USA: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

 

 

Sidi Boumedine, Rachid, and Signoles, Pierre (eds.) ‘Numéro « Les politiques de logement social au Maghreb/Machrek et dans le Sud Global »’. NAQD, no. 38–39 (2020). 

 

 

Vorms, Charlotte. ‘The shack issue in 1950s Madrid’. Le Mouvement Social 245, no. 4 (2013): 43–57.

 

 

Zappi, Lola. ‘Forming “Friendships” with Working-Class Families. Social Workers and Care in Interwar France: Between Vocation and Training’. Translated by Rosemary Rodwell. Clio. Women, Gender, History, no. 49 (2019): 95–115.