Call for Abstracts: “Punish and Rehabilitate through Work: Institutions, Discourses, and Agency in Central, Eastern, and Western Europe at the End of the 19th and in the First Half of the 20th Century” (Prague)

13-15 November 2024
Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences
Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, GWZO
German Historical Institute Warsaw
Faculty of Humanities, Charles University

Deadline for Applications: 4 April 2024

Workhouse, house of correction, reformatory, forced labour colony, disciplinary labour camp, etc. – these are only a few designations of the disciplinary institutions that proliferated across Eastern, Central, and Western Europe during the late 19th and in the first half of the 20th century. These disciplinary institutions served a dual purpose of confinement as well as correction. Behind their walls or within their compounds, citizens who deviated from the prevailing middle-class norms of “proper work” and “decent behaviour” were confined as well as corrected by making use of their labour. The declared aim of such institutions, whose tradition dates back to the early modern period, was therefore not only to punish individuals whose mobility, livelihood and other types of conduct were criminalised, but also to turn “alcoholics”, “beggars”, “delinquents”, “pimps”, “prostitutes”, and “vagrants”, to name only a few groups who were targeted, into “orderly citizens”.

The majority of existing research has focused on the 18th and 19th centuries and the role of the continental as well as the English workhouse in Western Europe in relation to nascent capitalism. Therefore, shifting the focus on the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century opens up new possibilities for inquiring into the continuities and discontinuities of the practices and functions of previously established or newly created disciplinary institutions that were intended to provide additional punishment while simultaneously correcting the allegedly deviant subjects through labour. In particular, the regions of Central and Eastern Europe underwent significant political, social and economic development during this period. This development included the transition from semi-peripheral regions of empires to nation-states and many turbulent transformations of political regimes, encompassing liberal and popular democracies, authoritarian regimes as well as Nazi and state-socialist dictatorships. The political transformations often went hand in hand with significant economic fluctuations, such as the Great Depression or the two world conflicts. In addition, various social and penal reforms were introduced during this period, which had serious repercussions on the idea of who and how should be punished and/or rehabilitated through work.

In this workshop, we aim to bring together scholars from various fields, mainly experts in the history of social policies, history of convict or forced labour, histories of diverse marginalised or criminalised groups, history of criminology and penal law, and history of prisons and prison reform.
Our intention is to explore the locally diverse disciplinary institutions such as continental workhouses, reformatories for young offenders, forced labour camps, etc. from various perspectives. These institutions could be located at the nexus of confinement, labour, and rehabilitation. They were embedded in a wider net of penal, social and economic measures and at the same time debated in expert circles as well as on the pages of the popular press. We also want to overcome the fact that the historiography of these various institutions remains very much focused on Western Europe, captive to national narratives, mostly overlooking institutions designed for women and often fragmented among a variety of research perspectives that overlap with each other only sporadically. Finally, in order to see possible innovations in this research field, we want to discuss the existing concepts (including disciplination, forced labour, and convict labour) that serve to interpret the meaning of these institutions and the methods and sources which could be used in order to reconstruct the everyday life of men and women assigned to these institutions as well as to re-examine the institutions’ role in confining specific groups of inhabitants, namely the Roma and Sinti.

Issues we would like contributors to address in the workshop are: