Household vs Institutional. Reflecting on the Book “Deprivation of Liberty in the Shadows of Institutions” by L. Series

Abstract

This book by Lucy Series, largely based on the ideas of E. Goffmann’s total institutions and M. Foucault’s disciplinary mechanisms, is devoted to the problem of the elderly and people with disabilities in need of social care being deprived of freedom in the carceral and post-carceral era. However, unlike other reviewers, the author of this article sees a significant contribution of L. Series not so much to the development of the theory of social inclusion, based on historical and modern cases from the UK, but to the development of theoretical and methodological ideas about the home and the institutions that, unlike the home environment, form a space where freedom of choice is restricted. Essentially the book allows answering the question of what a house is as a socio-cultural unit and why it can be opposed to social institutions due to a rather rigid demarcation of their respective spaces.