In line with the late works of Michel Foucault (Foucault 2008; 2009), this presentation draws on the notions of biopolitics and security in an analysis of conceptions of childhood. We set out to analyse the emergence of inter-professional collaborations as an answer to dealing with young children ‘at risk’. After WWII the educational sciences and practices in Denmark became increasingly influenced by progressivism, psychoanalysis and modern psychology. These disciplines and their professionals became a constituting part in the biopolitics between state and individual, specifically in relation to childhood (Hamre et al. 2019, Ydesen et al. 2018). Thus, the inter-professional collaboration between teachers, social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists emerged as a multi-facetted way of dealing with children perceived and assessed as being ‘at risk’. The inter-professional collaboration can be seen as central to an organization of the welfare state in which state governance was not a matter of mere administration, but of professional planning and problem solving (Andersen 1995; Plum 2018). Empirically the presentation draws on ten files on children assessed as deviant in the Municipality of Copenhagen in the 1950s. The files includes records from educationalists, psychologists and psychiatrists, and the collaboration between the disciplines and professionals. Generally, the files demonstrates a social and psychoanalytically informed conception of childhood and deviancy in which the child ‘at risk’ not only reflects a risk to society, but is perceived to portray general errors in the planning of the welfare state.

Andersen, N. Å. (1995). Selvskabt forvaltning. Forvaltningspolitikkens og centralforvaltningens udvikling i Danmark 1900-1994. Copenhagen: Nyt fra Samfundsvidenskaberne. Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the College de France 1982–1983. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hamre, B., Axelsson, T. & Ludvigsen, K. (2019) The Role of Psychiatry in the Sorting of School Children in Scandinavia 1920–1950 – IQ-testing, Child Guidance Clinics and Hospitalization, forthcoming. Plum, M. (2018). Humanism, Administration and Education: The Demand of Documentation and the Production of a New Pedagogical Desire. In S. Ball (red.), Foucault and Education: Putting theory to work (s. 166-182). London: Routledge Ydesen, C., Hamre, B., & Egedal Andreassen, K. (2018). Differentiation of Students in the Early Danish Welfare State: Professional Entanglements between Educational Psychologists and Psychiatrists, Nordic Journal of Educational History, Vol 5, 1, p. 73–96.