Victoria Shmidt

Public health as an agent of internal colonialism in interwar Czechoslovakia: shaping the discourse about the nation’s children

ABSTRACT Shmidt’s text discusses the specifics of internal colonialism in the discourses and practices of the dominant group (Czechs) concerning Slovaks and Rusyns, ethnic groups from the peripheral, eastern areas of interwar Czechoslovakia. By targeting the reproductive patterns of these groups, seen as undesirable by the authorities, internal colonialism shaped the discourse about children by consistently opposing the normalized childhood inside the nation to the supposedly abnormal child development outside the civilizing process. Shmidt focuses on three interwar projects aimed at introducing new public health practices as an ‘infrastructure of dependence’ with regard to the peripheral groups. Being directly supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, these projects contributed to building the new Czechoslovak nation and securing its international legitimacy.

Building the Czechoslovak nation and sacralizing peoples’ health: the vicissitudes of disability discourse during the 1920s

Abstract During the interwar period, the sacred meaning of health was refined and disseminated due to mutual efforts from both international and national stakeholders in different countries. This text aims to identify and explore the main pathways of connecting the discourse of health to the nation’s identity as a substitute for traditional religion in Czechoslovakia during the 1920s, a period during which institutions were created and new discourses about health were promoted. By investigating the primary discourses and policies concerning people with disabilities, we deconstruct the concept of functional health as used by Czechoslovak ideologists, in their attempts to connect health and labour as the grounds for building the nation. We trace how the concept of functional health and disability as inability to work operated in favour of delegitimizing the Roma as a nation and establishing tough strategies of surveillance of the Roma population.

Child welfare discourses and practices in the Czech lands: the segregation of Roma and disabled children during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Přes veskere pokusy o lepsi porozuměni přicinam a důsledkům segregace děti romskeho etnika a děti se zdravotnim postiženim v CR zůstava tato silně zpolitizovana problematika na okraji zajmu mnoha vědeckých disciplin. Chybi zejmena interdisciplinarni přistup, který by dokazal prohloubit soucasne poznani a pomohl tak vypracovat ucelenou teorii segregace. Tato kniha sleduje formovani instituci a diskursů, týkajicich se vzdělavani a socialni pece, ktere byly a jsou za posledni 150 let v ceských zemich urcene dětem s postiženim a dětem romskeho etnika. V souladu se zasadou historizace použiva autorka institucionalni diskurs-analýzu, kdy na zakladě zkoumani v archivech, rozboru odborných periodik a sekundarnich výzkumů vysvětluje soucasne nedostatky a limity eforem směrujicich k integraci děti s postiženim a romskeho etnika. Recenze knihy (EN)