Centre for the History of Childhood Colloquium 2026 – ‘Charity, Humanitarianism and Childhood’

3 August 2026

This year’s colloquium on Charity, Humanitarianism, and Childhood at the University of Oxford’s Centre for the History of Childhood took a closer look at the tight knot that binds humanitarianism to the history of childhood. In historical and contemporary studies, its participants picked apart the seemingly self-evident relationship between childhood innocence and humanitarian munificence. There are immediate and tangible political stakes to this question, as many of the papers reminded us. An entire infrastructure of institutions and publics is formed around the symbolic short-circuit between humanitarian intervention and the wellbeing of children. Humanitarian appeals regularly evoke the desperate needs of children, urging their audiences to rise above apathy and controversy in a way that seems fundamental to the humanitarian mission in all forms. Any effort to understand the (in)effectiveness of these networked ideas and practices must have a clear view of the intermediate links, past and present, that fall between sympathetic observer and needy recipient.

A consistent theme was the voluntarism of civil society, which has left a rich archive of its activities at the margins of modern nation-states and empires. Lukas Schretter and Anaïs Faurt described how voluntary institutions in England and French-colonial Madagascar filled in gaps left by post-war uncertainties, selectively compensating for the inability or unwillingness of states to provide care for children while remaining subject to the priorities of state authorities along national and imperial lines of exclusion. These projects of ‘citizen humanitarianism’ blended hegemonic projects with other purposes. Divya Kannan and Dror Sharon captured twentieth-century humanitarian campaigns by activist-volunteers that sought not only to facilitate the health and safety of children but also served as an avenue for building international solidarities. Children themselves were active participants in voluntary organizations. According to Fiona Maxwell and Layla Koch, child humanitarians helped to reproduce influential institutions like the settlement house and norms like missionary paternalism, respectively. Animated by children and childhood in unique and decisive ways, voluntary associations were a crucial auxiliary to the better-known national and international organizations.

At the intimate scale of associational life, the social and intellectual workings of the humanitarian appeal to childhood can be scrutinized more closely. On the one hand, such overtures depended on tangible interactions. In many papers, spatial boundaries – city and suburb, coast and interior, metropole and colony – were discernibly superseded in material and symbolic exchanges motivated by the welfare of children. According to Dror Sharon, for example, the Basque children temporarily resettled in coastal England facilitated “close daily contact” with local residents, giving ideological conflict in Europe a “tangible form” for them. On the other hand, the intellectual practice of humanitarians, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, was distinctly holistic. Camille Jaccard’s discussion of SEPEG, a postwar Swiss child psychiatry centre, joined Kannan, Faurt, and others in noting that interdisciplinary knowledge and practice suited both the makeshift nature of humanitarian networks and the perceived depth and complexity of children’s suffering. Rebecca Clifford’s keynote paper on “the making of child Holocaust survivors” threaded both of these themes together. Her account of “the Lingfield children” detailed how their “internal recovery” – both psychological and moral – was jointly imagined and managed by an international Jewish aid organization, a West London synagogue, and the pioneering child psychoanalyst Anna Freud as a reproduceable model of how to restore a normative childhood after individual and collective trauma. Her memorable image of a promotional ‘before-and-after’ photograph showing the recovery of a child’s smile encapsulated the ways in which twentieth-century humanitarian conjunctures formed around embodied, holistic discourses of childhood.

Another generative line of thought emphasized affect’s role in understanding the links between humanitarianism and childhood. The emotional labour that children perform within the family emerged in papers by Verónica Díaz-Cerda and Elizabeth Wehbe as a factor that has conditioned the provision of humanitarian services and helped to compensate, to some extent, for the traumas of need, disruption, and intervention that surround them. Among Díaz-Cerda’s Chilean exiles in the United Kingdom and Wehbe’s asylum seekers in the United States, the intermediary role that children have played in relation to humanitarian services has been functionally contiguous with the emotional work of helping parents cope with the pressures of (im)mobility. Here, once more, the relationship of childhood to humanitarianism is not only a question of its broad symbolic resonance, but can be traced through multiple sociocultural, experiential, and affective pathways. Attention to these phenomena has necessarily encouraged analytical creativity. Stacey Hynd’s description of her research project’s simultaneous “empirical” and “phenomenological” approaches to the notion of ‘the African child soldier’ is an example of this methodological flexibility and breadth, and her re-framings of the Nigerian, Ugandan, and Ethiopian contexts confirmed that a flattening humanitarian discourse must be interrogated not only on its own terms, but also by foregrounding the lifeworlds of its ostensible objects and other related historical actors.

Despite varied points of emphasis and areas of focus, then, the colloquium papers converged on the deconstructive task of disassociating the humanitarian calling and the rhetorical figure of a certain modern childhood. Altogether, the colloquium was an exciting indication of the archives revisited and new approaches devised to shed light on the gap between these two clusters of societal concern – a gap which contains the practices, ideas, and feelings that are responsible for the humanitarian vision of childhood becoming unavoidable to observers and undeniable to devotees. Yet despite, and perhaps even because of its urgency, a rigorous and engaging history of childhood and humanitarianism can be hindered by the familiar snare of scholarly parochialism. During an end-of-day roundtable discussion, participants commented thoughtfully on the themes that had largely gone unexplored in the colloquium’s programme, such as early or pre-modern examples of charitable work for children and discourses of collective care for children outside of Western and Christian frameworks. The drift of the colloquium’s historical papers towards the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as documented in Western archives is, no doubt, indicative of wider patterns of interest and access. Nonetheless, by immersing themselves in the intersubjective and everyday mesh within and behind institutions of care and improvement and holding at arm’s length the modern discourses of humanitarianism and childhood, the colloquium papers perhaps also opened avenues to reframe – and thus de-exceptionalize – the last few centuries within a wider historical tableau of children and charity.