Acasă Articole RTR „Sunt un fost tânăr de viitor”: instrumentalizarea pedagogică a dizabilității dobândite ca...
„Sunt un fost tânăr de viitor”: instrumentalizarea pedagogică a dizabilității dobândite ca tragedie personală în filmele de protecție a muncii din România Socialistă
Rezumat
“I Am a Former Young Man of the Future”: The Pedagogical Instrumentalization of Acquired Disability
as Personal Tragedy in Socialist Romanian Workplace Safety Films
Abstract: This article examines the narrative strategies through which the acquisition of disability following industrial accidents is represented in occupational safety films produced in Romania during late socialism. The aim of this investigation is to trace how disability is discursively constructed in these films according to both productivist and humanist-individualist ideas that shaped this cultural representation—ideologically as well as in terms of disability policies. In addition, this transdisciplinary research highlights how these discourses are shaped and sustained by the production and circulation logic of socialist cinema. We analyze workplace safety films in order to reveal how various narratives of acquiring a permanent disability, framed as a personal tragedy, obscure the physical and social barriers to the labor inclusion of people with disabilities, as well as the social conditions underlying workplace accident risks. Within this narrative framework, responsibility for safety in hazardous industrial environments is shifted onto the worker, and occupational safety is presented as a personal moral obligation. In this way, the consequences of accidents become an individual issue to be addressed pedagogically through film, reflecting a systemic tendency to displace risk away from the state, the factory, or the administrative hierarchy and onto the worker. At the same time, by representing the acquisition of disability as a personal tragedy, ableist modes of relating to disability are normalized, framing acquired disability as a form of social death legitimized by individual exclusion from the productivist logic.
Keywords: occupational safety films, late socialism, disability, productivism, social death
Citation suggestion: Safta-Zecheria, Leyla and Szel, Ana. “’Sunt un fost tânăr de viitor’: instrumentalizarea pedagogică a dizabilității dobândite ca tragedie personală în filmele de protecție a muncii din România Socialistă”. Transilvania, no. 1-2 (2026): 108-120.
https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2026.1-2.10.
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