Welfare and domestic space in Southeastern Europe. An introduction

This issue studies welfare in Southeastern Europe through the lens of domestic space, from the provision of housing to the prescription of domestic practices. In the twentieth century, states, associations and international actors, all entangled in a ‘mixed economy of welfare’, intervened in domestic spaces which became settings of national and international attention. In a region at the crossroad of three former empires, marked by competing ideologies, population displacements and humanitarian interventions, studying welfare initiatives at the domestic scale sheds light on unexplored aspects of Southeastern European history. In this introduction, the authors underline how housing provision and intervention in the domestic sphere has a longer history than the appearance of modern welfare. It describes the methodological proposition to intertwine welfare and the domestic, inspired by feminist geography and attentiveness to materiality. This introduction also presents the contributions on various case studies, ranging from Greece in the early 1920s to late socialist Yugoslavia, via Kemalist Turkey, united by a common will to use the domestic as a heuristic category in their study of welfare and to find creative ways to uncover and study new archival material.