ABSTRACT
After the Second World War, categories and concepts from the area of public health were crucial in forming perceptions of normality and social deviance. This chapter focuses on socialt handikapp (social disability), a concept used in the management of European refugees who were considered difficult to incorporate into mainstream society, and of a group of Roma people who were formally recognised as Swedish citizens but perceived as unable to fulfil the demands of citizenship. Up until the Second World War, both groups had been defined as unworthy of benefits, but were now considered worthy of social support and citizenship status.
The processes illustrate a time period when the boundaries between deserving and undeserving poor – citizens and aliens – shifted. In our chapter, we argue that knowledge, concepts and practices from the area of public health played instrumental roles in this relativising and redrawing of boundaries. The new policies and practices were legitimised by a rhetoric of social inclusion. However, despite these ambitions, they produced a fabric of measures, practices and further interventions that have prolonged the social marginality of many refugees and Roma groups. The use of public health concepts in the social area thus enabled the construction of new excluding spaces within institutionalised forms.
