Professor Gordon Lynch will give his Kent Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities (KIASH) inaugural lecture, ‘Remembering the UK Child Migrants: Faith, Nation-Building and the Shadow Side of Charity’, on Wednesday 4 February at 6pm in Keynes lecture theatre 1.
Between 1869 and the early 1970s around 100,000 children were sent from the UK, unaccompanied by their parents, to live in Canada, Australia, Rhodesia and New Zealand. Originating as a form of welfare response to social deprivation, the child migration schemes later became more formalised strategies of empire settlement and the building up of ‘white dominions’ overseas. Represented as redemptive interventions into children’s lives, the schemes persisted in spite of the suffering they caused to children, evidence of their failures and later shifts in public policy that challenged many of their working methods. This lecture will examine the moral motivations underpinning these schemes and the relationship between these motivations and their harmful effects on children’s lives. In doing so, it raises wider questions both about how we remember child migration today and how the expression of charitable impulse can have damaging social effects.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Keynes Foyer. All are welcome, full details can be found on the School’s events page: www.kent.ac.uk/secl/events