Social Exclusion and Social Inclusion

The course Social Exclusion and Social Inclusion focuses on the inherent processes of social differentiation that characterize modern societies, creating regimes of exclusion and social inclusion. After first defining the concept of social exclusion in relation to the corresponding epistemological examples that support them, we will test their validity in examining the thematic areas of health, education, work, gender difference, crime, housing, cultural practices, disability, sexual discrimination, etc. Emphasis will be placed on the de- and restructuring of the social bond, on the search for the mechanisms that create "places" of exclusion of the different, the "other", the "deviant" ("heterotopias") which are, however, at the same time "places" of inclusion of individuals and groups ("holistic institutions": workhouses, hospital, psychiatric hospital, prison, etc.). The crucial thing is for social analysis to transcend methodological dualisms and to dialectically approach the social bond with its contradictions, ruptures and discontinuities and its meanings, especially when the properties-functions of individuals and groups are not personal but social, encapsulated in the social division of labor (class positions, cultural capital, power relations, etc.). Precisely for this reason, "social inclusion" will be theorized through the methodological scheme of M. Foucault ("social discipline", "biopolitics") and the corresponding one of D. Lockwood & N. Mouzelis ("systemic inclusion"/"social inclusion") in order to understand the ambiguous character of "social inclusion" and to historicize the condition that dictates the form of inclusion each time. It is particularly important to highlight the epistemological background of the concepts "social exclusion" and "social inclusion" in order to demonstrate their analytical capacity as well as their finiteness, especially when these concepts are proposed as tools for analysis for problems and situations with different causes (see unemployment, poverty, addiction, illness, etc.). In this sense, we can speak of a Paradigm. To a large extent, this particular Paradigm ("social exclusion", "social inclusion", "social integration", "social enclosure", etc.) appears when the universality of the welfare state is abolished and interest shifts to specific social policies and "excluded groups". A consequence of this development was the methodological search for the causes of social phenomena at the micro level (individual, subject, intersubjectivity) or at the meso level (intersubjectivity, social capital, cultural capital, etc.), a fact that favored, especially the former, in turn therapeutic and clinical approaches to the "social". The shift from the macro-, meso-, to the micro-level and to difference (cultural, ethnic, gender, etc.) occurs while the sphere of production is being restructured and the social structure is changing (reduction of the industrial working class, expansion of the middle bourgeois strata, etc.), changes that give the impression that social classes have receded as socio-cultural entities. However, these developments are linked to the generalization of the wage contract, the expansion of the post-factory working class, the proletarianization of middle layers of wage labor (informal forms of wage labor, subcontracting, those employed on a piece-rate basis, part-time employment, etc.) and to vertical structures of social inequality, which makes it reasonable to ask why social analysis is abandoning tried and tested tools of analysis with a solid theoretical structure such as social classes, social inequalities, etc., choosing tools of analysis with a strong ideological connotation, such as "social exclusion," etc.