Constructing the Governable Society: Education, Family, Work, and Welfare In Modern East Asia

This session examines how foundational social categories and fields of intervention—the teaching profession, the family, labor, and welfare—were constructed, standardized, and made comparable across modern East Asian societies. Modernization in the region involved not only economic and political transformation but the production of new administrative objects: the credentialed teacher, the demographically legible household, the regulated worker, the welfare subject. These categories did not merely describe existing social reality; they actively reorganized it, often erasing earlier regional, colonial, or pre-modern heterogeneity. Recent scholarship on the professionalization of teachers as institutionalized labor, the historical demography of family structures, and the construction of social policy as a comparable object across welfare and labor regimes invites broader East Asian and cross-regional dialogue—one resonant with longstanding East Asian historical-sociological engagement with the institutional histories of education, medicine, law, and the city.

We invite papers on, among others:

1. Professionalization and reproduction of work: how occupations such as teaching were constituted, credentialed, and reproduced as regulated labor, and what social hierarchies this process embedded.
2. Demographic and familial standardization: how diverse regional population and family structures—including the changing status of children within families—became standardized into nationally legible forms.
3. Comparability of social and labor policy: how such policy became an observable object of intervention, comparison, and historical explanation across regimes in Europe and East Asia.
4. Colonial and postcolonial institutional legacies: how East Asian experiences of colonial and postcolonial institution-building in education, family registration, labor, and social administration compare and connect across national cases.