Written by Dr. Sonia Knapczyk-Tomalka (Report 2)
On 3–4 September 2026, Newcastle University hosted Caring Communities: Rethinking Histories of Care, Class and Kinship, c.1800–present. Held in the Henry Daysh Building, the two-day conference brought together eighteen speakers across six thematic panels, with additional contributions delivered online. The event was organised by Claudia Soares and the Caring Communities team as part of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project Caring Communities: Rethinking Children’s Social Care, 1800–present (MR/X034968/1), with support from UKRI and partner organisations including the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
The conference set out to rethink histories of care by bringing together scholarship on children, families, institutions, communities and forms of paid and unpaid labour across a broad geographical and chronological range. Rather than treating care simply as a benevolent practice, the programme encouraged participants to examine its economic, emotional, social and political dimensions. Across the two days, a recurring question was how relationships described as ‘caring’ were shaped by inequalities of class, gender, race, religion and power. The programme was organised around six themes, ranging from archival ethics and the economics of intimacy to landscapes of hardship, grassroots activism, archival engagement, and families under the Poor Law.
The first panel, on archival ethics, immediately established one of the central concerns of the conference: how can historians recover the experiences and voices of people whose lives were extensively documented but rarely in their own words? Tanmay Kulshrestha’s paper on ayahs in colonial India demonstrated the complexity of this problem particularly effectively. The presentation showed how even the apparently straightforward identification of a domestic servant can become problematic in the archive, where terminology, spelling and colonial classifications obscure the people historians are trying to locate. Sources often reveal more about how ayahs were imagined by colonial society than about their own experiences. Commercial and cultural representations could even transform the figure of the ayah into a marketable idea, demonstrating how visibility in the archive does not necessarily equate to historical agency.
This problem of mediated voices reappeared throughout the conference. The discussion repeatedly returned to the question of how historians can read institutional records ‘against the grain’. In the paper on boarding out in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lincolnshire, for example, the surviving records were largely written by inspectors and administrators. Yet small observations about children’s behaviour, schooling, clothing, illness or relationships could provide clues about their lived experiences. Such sources reveal both the possibilities and limitations of reconstructing the history of marginalised children. The paper also highlighted the tension between affection and transaction: foster care could provide safety, family life and emotional attachment, while simultaneously functioning as an economic arrangement in which children’s labour or foster payments mattered greatly.
The second panel developed this theme by explicitly examining the economics of intimacy. Kate Gibson’s discussion of foster care in Britain between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries demonstrated that payment and affection should not necessarily be understood as opposites. Foster care formed part of household economies, particularly for working-class women, and carers could make careful economic decisions about the number and timing of children they accepted. At the same time, the language surrounding good care frequently privileged love and altruism over financial reward. This tension between care as emotional relationship and care as labour became one of the most productive threads running through the conference.
The panel Landscapes of hardship: spaces, senses and the boundaries of care brought these questions into conversation with material and sensory history. My own paper, ‘Cold Rooms, Empty Plates: The Material and Sensory Worlds of Orphan Care in Postwar Krakow, 1945–1952’, examined how poverty, damaged buildings, material deprivation and the sensory environment shaped the experiences of orphaned children and their carers. The presentation placed space and sensory experience at the centre of the history of post-war institutional care. The subsequent discussion was particularly valuable in opening a comparative perspective: participants asked about the public presence of institutionalised children and the relationship between orphanages and the towns in which they were located. I argued that, while children could initially be taken into private homes as an act of solidarity, the later development of large, state-controlled orphanages often increased their physical and social isolation.
Laura Nys’s paper on Belgian reform schools complemented this perspective by considering institutional space as a dynamic boundary rather than simply a physical wall. Reform schools created internal divisions between different categories of children and established rules governing movement between the institution and the outside world. Yet children could also challenge these boundaries. Examples of pupils refusing to accept the intended meaning of punishment spaces demonstrated that institutional control was never absolute. This led to a broader discussion about how distance, isolation and the organisation of space could both facilitate abuse and shape relationships between children and institutions.
The final contribution to that panel, on the emergence of the Ontario Children’s Aid Society, further expanded the question of who was considered worthy of care. The paper connected early foster care to colonialism, racism and nationalism, showing how the ideal of the ‘caring family’ could simultaneously function as a mechanism for cultural assimilation. Children brought to Canada through immigration schemes could be placed in families under the assumption that a Christian home would reform them, while their labour and racialised identities shaped their treatment. The discussion therefore encouraged participants to consider not only how care was provided, but also how institutions and societies defined the children who were entitled to it.
The second day continued to broaden the concept of care. Anna Muggeridge’s paper on ‘Homes for Tired Mothers’ examined welfare initiatives that provided working-class mothers with short holidays in the countryside or by the sea. These schemes recognised domestic labour as physically demanding, although they did not challenge the gendered assumption that caring for the household was women’s responsibility. The apparent generosity of such programmes therefore coexisted with wider systems of social control and, at times, eugenic ideas about the importance of mothers to the health of the next generation.
The final panel returned to families, institutions and the Poor Law. Papers on Italian conservatories, Poor Law cottage homes and Welsh foster care demonstrated the continuing importance of kinship alongside formal welfare structures. Particularly striking was the evidence that Poor Law authorities sometimes attempted to preserve sibling relationships, while families and relatives took children in despite considerable financial pressures. The discussion raised important questions about the invisible labour of kin carers and the expectation that relatives would absorb the costs of care within their own households.
One of the conference’s greatest strengths was the continuity between papers that dealt with very different places and periods. Questions about archival silence, children’s voices, emotional attachment, payment, labour, institutional space and social inequality repeatedly resurfaced. The discussions also demonstrated the value of bringing together historians of childhood, social care, emotions, material culture, family history and institutional history. Rather than presenting care as a stable category, the conference showed it to be historically contingent, negotiated and often contradictory.
The intimate scale of the event supported this exchange. Panels were held in a single building, with refreshments and breaks providing opportunities for informal discussion, while the first day’s programme concluded with a reception and conference dinner. The atmosphere was collegial and constructive, with speakers openly inviting questions and feedback and discussions frequently continuing beyond the formal papers.
For me, the conference was particularly valuable in placing post-war Polish orphan care within a wider international history of childhood and social care. It demonstrated the potential of comparative approaches while also highlighting the importance of attending to local material, sensory and social contexts. Most importantly, it encouraged a more critical understanding of care—not simply as protection or benevolence, but as a practice shaped by resources, relationships, institutions and unequal structures of power.