Charity, Humanitarianism, and Childhood (in person)

Charity, Humanitarianism, and Childhood

Colloquium 2026

Monday 22nd June 2026: 9.15am-4.50pm

Centre for the History of Childhood

Register to attend in person at Magdalen College, Oxford, UK

Programme

9.15-9.30 Welcome

9.30-11.30 Panel One: Children as humanitarians

Layla Koch (University of Heidelberg): Dear Samuel, Dear Children: Interdependent Ideas of Charity and Childhood in the Early U.S. Missionary Movement, 1830-40

Fiona Maxwell (North Central College): “The Faithful Band of Young Folks”: Children as Charitable Actors in Chicago Settlement Work, 1890–1960

Verónica Díaz-Cerda (University of Warwick): Beyond Solidarity: Children’s Memories of Communities of Care in the Chilean Exile in Britain

Elizabeth Wehbe (Rutgers University-Camden): Childhood, Humanitarianism, and the Home in Asylum-Seeking Families

11.30-11.45 Tea & Coffee

11.45-12.30 Keynote

Rebecca Clifford (Durham University): Humanitarianism and the making of child Holocaust survivors: the case of the Lingfield children

12.30-1.15 Lunch

1.15-2.45 Panel Two: Humanitarianism and war

Dror Sharon (Tel Aviv University): A Lever and a Place to Stand: Humanitarian Child Evacuation as Political Protest in late 1930s Britain

Camille Jaccard (University of Lausanne): Humanitarian Frameworks and the Making of Post-War Child Psychiatry: Transnational Training for the Care of War-Affected Children (1944–1950)

Lukas Schretter (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute): “Occupation Children”, Charity, and the Struggle for Responsibility: Humanitarian Efforts for Children of British Soldiers in Post-World War II Austria and Germany

2.45-3 Tea & Coffee

3-4.30 Panel Three: Colonial and postcolonial humanitarianism

Anaïs Faurt (Chestnut Hill College): Child protection, private charity, and colonial humanitarianism at the end of the French empire (1945-1960)

Divya Kannan (Shiv Nadar University): From Australia to India: The Aid for India Campaign and the Making of the Humanitarian Child

Stacey Hynd (University of Exeter): Contested Constructions of Africa’s Child Soldiers: Humanitarianism, the Limits of Childhood and Youth Identities, 1980-2010s

4.30-4.50 Roundtable discussion

Find out more about the Centre for the History of Childhood: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/centre-history-childhood

Join the Centre’s mailing list: https://web.maillist.ox.ac.uk/ox/info/history-of-childhood

Image: American Red Cross, France, Havoc of War - Refugees - France - Demonstration for the mothers and teachers are held daily at the Child-Welfare exhibition, Toulouse, France, under the auspices of the A.R.C (1918), Wikimedia Commons

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