Negotiating Educational Spaces in Residential Care 1970-1990

The 1970s have commonly been considered to mark the end of restrictive residential care for children in the German-speaking area. However, preliminary studies for this project have shown that this thesis is only partially true. In the 1970s-1980s, the residential childcare systems in different welfare regions in Austria, Germany and Switzerland developed at varying speeds and degrees. In the wake of 1968, widespread criticism of residential care lead to reform initiatives with different levels of effectiveness. But, many areas actually lacked substantial change. A significant number of children and youths experienced only slightly altered conditions in residential care institutions for at least another two decades. Little research has been done on this transition period marked by change and persistence. This project aims to close this research gap. What are the dynamics of the transformation processes in the welfare regions under investigation? Which reciprocal effects do they lead to on a local, regional, national and transnational level? Which established institutional practices and structures, which fields of discourse and which constellations of protagonists determine the degree and speed of transformation? This study uses a comparative approach. Six case studies will serve as empirical research units. They have been selected to represent three prototypical and contrasting welfare regions that reflect the non-simultaneous conditions of development in the period under investigation: Tyrol/Vorarlberg (Austria), Hesse (Germany) and Zurich (Switzerland). Data will be drawn from extensive archival sources as well as from several dozen interviews to be conducted with eyewitnesses from the transition period. The project will examine how changes in educational spaces in residential childcare were negotiated. The specific welfare landscapes along with their respective welfare regimes provide the contextual conditions for these negotiations. A relational and activity-theoretical spatial theory is used as a research perspective. The purpose of the trilateral cross-border project is to deliver an appropriate and differentiated description of this under researched transition period, not only to provide new findings related to the recent history of out-of-home care, but also to seek new methodologies in researching welfare state transformations. This project is jointly conducted by the universities of Innsbruck (Univ-Prof. Michaela Ralser), Kassel (Univ.-Prof. Mechthild Bereswill) and the university of applied sciences Nordwestschweiz/Olten (Prof. Gisela Hauss). It includes researchers from several disciplines ranging from Educational Science and History to Sociology, Philosophy and Social Work.

The study examines the transformation of residential child care during the transitional period of the 1970s and 1980s in West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Driven by the social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the wake of "1968", residential child care institutions in all three countries came under increasing criticism and pressure. This crisis of legitimacy facing residential child care and its institutions did not, however, lead to an immediate paradigmatic institutional shift everywhere. The findings indicate that these transformations must be understood as long-term, processual developments that were far from complete even with the reforms of the child and youth welfare legislation around 1990. Developments in residential child care during the period under investigation are characterised by a coexistence of change and continuity, of sudden transformative events and long-lasting continuities. Focusing on the structural conditions underpinning this simultaneous yet asynchronous coexistence of change and persistence has proven to be an effective analytical lens. Three regional field constellations were selected for comparative analysis, each representing a prototypical configuration of such uneven developments: the federal state of Tyrol for Austria, the city of Zurich for Switzerland, and Hesse for West Germany. These exemplary welfare landscapes were examined as specific constellations of time, space, discourse, and actors within a changing child and youth welfare system. The study first examined the inherent dynamics of regional change processes in relation to historical time. As a unifying analytical perspective, it focused on educational spaces. The often hybrid spaces of residential child care, as well as their reconfigurations, can be interpreted as provisional outcomes of negotiated processes of change. They extend from small-scale attempts to open up existing structures to larger-scale restructurings of the child and youth welfare system. The same applies to the complex interplay of the actors of change within and beyond the field and the transformations they initiated: These range from minor shifts deep within residential child care to fundamentally new pedagogical configurations of relationships and support in child and youth welfare. The publication "Reformdynamiken in der Heimerziehung 1970-1990. Fallstudien aus Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz", published in 2026 by Beltz, highlights the different areas of change and reform objectives, as well as their scope, in a cross-national comparison. The book "Langes Ende - unvollständiger Anfang. Der Wandel der Heimerziehung in Tirol 1970-1990", published in 2026 by StudienVerlag, provides a well-documented account of a regional case. The research findings have also been disseminated nationally and internationally in various journal articles.