Engineering Socialist Integration in the Age of Normalisation: Roma and People with Disabilities as Objects of Care in Socialist Czechoslovakia
Abstrakt
This chapter explores discourses of race and disability in the final decades of state socialism. We analyse the programmes of integration as new governance strategies that were formulated by experts in the early 1970s and that were primarily aimed at both Roma people and people with disabilities.
Discussing the integration programmes and the ways in which socialist Czechoslovakia gave meaning to the notion of integration, we engage in several interventions:First, exploring the ways in which the politics of integration functioned in late socialism, we wish to contribute to the scholarship that nuances the view of late socialism, "normalisation" and the nature of its ideological force. Second, we broaden the historical knowledge about the development and circulation of the concept of integration in socialist societies.
Our criticalexploration of ambivalences and the ideological nature of the concept of integration as it was defined, circulated and utilised in socialist Czechoslovakia contributes to a study of the local traditions and legacies of the concept of integration. And finally, we explore how the expert debates on the "integration" of Roma and people with disabilities depended on intersections between disability and race and what these intersections indicate about the nature of socialist epistemologies of difference (and normalcy).