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

Abstract

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.