Defining Practices of the Danish Welfare Nation State, 1945-1970s

– A comparative case study of professionals, others and interventions

by Christian Ydesen, Aalborg University

This sub-project employs a comparative methodological design to investigate the handling of different children and families deemed as deviant by the established Danish welfare state society in general and the national public school system [Folkeskole] in particular. In addition, the project also has a comparative component with the English welfare state. The project is guided by the following research questions:

• Which professionals, organisations, movements, and technologies affiliated with the Folkeskole played central parts in the identification and subsequent interventions towards different categories of deviant children and families in the emerging and consolidated Danish welfare state?
• Where were the diachronic and synchronic boundaries of unacceptable otherness, including which ideals of normality were held, and what were the justifications and values inherent in the intervening practises?

The analysis comprises three empirical cases each containing the explicit handling of deviant children and families by educational professionals:

1) The handling of the German minority in Southern Jutland between 1945 and 1955

2) The handling of Greenlandic minority children within the Danish commonwealth between 1961 and 1976 and

3) the handling of SEN children at the Emdrupborg Experimental School between 1948 and 1959.

he English component features the Birmingham local education administration’s handling of immigrants between 1948 and 1971. The sub-project contributes knowledge about the historical relations between the state, professionals, and deviants with a specific focus on education and ethnic minorities. And, in a wider perspective, the chapter analytically unfolds the workings of state-crafting processes in the emerging and consolidated Danish welfare state.