Inclusion As Exclusion: A Global Historical Sociology of Vagrant Confinement and the Welfare Camp In the Twentieth Century

The institution that confines the vagrant is constitutively paradoxical. It gathers in those whom society has cast out, yet authorizes their destruction in the name of their salvation; it stands within the nation-state, yet operates as a zone suspended from its ordinary law. It is a social space that normalizes the exception, perpetually redrawing the boundary between the normal and the disposable. Across the twentieth century—in workhouses and colonial labour colonies, developmental "rehabilitation" centres and welfare camps, asylums for the idle and institutions for the "socially dangerous"—this paradox recurred in strikingly varied forms.

This session builds a global historical sociology of inclusion-as-exclusion: the modern state's governing of populations through their abandonment, and their correction through their elimination. It holds in tension two rationalities these institutions fused—the abandonment of the excluded (the camp, the exception) and the disciplinary correction of the abnormal (the reformatory, normalization)—asking how they were welded together under the idiom of welfare and care. At their core lay a vertical taxonomy sorting the normal from the abnormal, and the redeemable from the irredeemable, allocating some to discipline and others to disposal.

We invite archivally grounded and comparative papers from across world regions—European, settler-colonial, Asian and African, Latin American, and post-Soviet—including the East Asian trajectories (in particular, South Korea) that first prompted this session. We especially welcome work examining how these classificatory machineries racialized, gendered, and classed their subjects, engaging Agamben, Foucault, and the historiography of the carceral.