Tracing the Roots of Welfare - New perspectives on how Danish citizenship was practiced, negotiated and shaped from 1849 to 1933

This project traces the roots of the Danish welfare state by focusing on the interaction between the local and the national, formal rights and everyday practice in shaping social citizenship from the Constitution of 1849 to the social reform of 1933. The project investigates this transformation from social state to welfare state by using the concept of citizenship as an analytical category.As oppose to treating citizenship primarily as a fixed juridical or legal status, the project positions both the providers and the receivers of poor relief as active agents in the socio-political field. Using the city of Aarhus as the focal point of the analysis, the project investigates how acts related to poor relief shaped social rights at the local level. Thereby giving insight into the ways in which formally defined hierarchies and rights were enacted and challenged at a daily basis, especially how the Lutheran understanding of the household affected the allocation, as well as the practice of social citizenship