The politics of disability in interwar and socialist Czechoslovakia: segregating in the name of the nation

Answering the question concerning what driving forces had led public health, welfare policy and education to operate as agents and structures of segregation is one of the core prerequisites for sustainable desegregation and historical justice. This book reexamines the politics of disability in interwar and socialist Czechoslovakia as embedded into nation building, recruited to legitimize diverse forms of structural violence against people with disabilities and ethnic minorities. The authors trace the intersectionality of ethnicity and disability, which proliferated across diverse realms of public life, positioning the continuities and ruptures of interrogating propaganda and racial science during the interwar and post-war periods as establishing and reinforcing the border between a healthy Czech majority and a disabled Roma minority. Writing from their experience, the authors critically revise this border that remains observable but unapproachable until it operates as a part of constructing the authenticity of a nation

1.2 Epistemic communities: The struggle for political influence1.3 The institutionalization of health care: Between multiple challenges and limited options; 1.4 The reform of public health: Great unmet expectations; 1.5 Debates around inferiority and reproductive policies: The Tower of Babylon; 2. The Discourse of Disability; A Noah's Ark for the New Nation?; Victoria Shmidt and Karel Pančocha; 2.1 Functional health: The utilitarian discourse of disability; 2.2 Men in focus: Functional health as a part of the gender-imbalanced propaganda of public health