Written by Tanmay Kulshrestha, AHRC-funded PhD researcher, University of Leeds (Report 1)
The conferene, held between 3rd-4th September at Newcastle University brought together delegates and speakers across six sessions over two days, generously supported by United Kingdom research and innovation (UKRI), Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM), Social History Society and Society for the History of Children and Youth (SSHCY) and part of of UKRI FLF grant – Caring Communities: Rethinking Children’s Social Care, 1800-present [MR/X034968/1].
From the outset the atmosphere favoured collegiality over ceremony. A relaxed welcome reception set the tone for two days of thinking together rather than performing at each other, and the question-and-answer sessions kept this informality throughout. The academic programme organised itself around a single throughline: care as both a historical object and a live political question. The opening panels considered how the archive itself shapes what can be known about ayahs and other female domestic servants in colonial India, whose presence in the historical record is mediated through the households that employed them rather than recorded by them. This attentiveness to the ethics of the source carried into discussions of childcare’s uneven power dynamics, and closed with a look at present-day efforts, often led by heritage foundations rather than universities, to build a public-facing ‘care economy’ that treats caregiving as a subject for community engagement rather than a pursuit reserved for schools and colleges.
A second thread treated care as transactional as well as sentimental. Papers drawing on wills and bequests traced the economy of intimacy between British colonial officers and the women in their households, nannies, mistresses, second wives, showing how affection and obligation were bound up with material exchange in ways the archive records more readily than it explains. The theme resurfaced, transposed into a different register, in a closing session that followed childcare’s emotional charge beyond the usual European and colonial frame into Russian territory, a useful reminder that caring ecosystems recur, with local variation, well outside the geographies most familiar to this field.
Lunch and the afternoon coffee break did as much work as the panels: conversations that could not fit into fifteen minutes of question time ran on for an hour, surfacing thematic connections, between economy and emotion, archive and ethics, that the programme’s session divisions did not quite anticipate.
The second day picked up where the first left off, opening with panels on mothers, community childcare and nurseries operating in constrained environments. Attendance held at roughly ninety per cent of the previous day, itself a small data point for how the field’s habit of turning up to hear colleagues, not only to deliver one’s own paper, reinforces a point implicit throughout: these research areas are not self-contained but overlap across geography, period and culture more than the programme’s session titles suggest. A shorter archives-focused panel examined the practical work of locating and negotiating access to primary sources, a useful counterpoint to the more interpretive papers elsewhere on the programme. The final panel turned to the legal architecture around cottage homes and foster care for the poor, extended by an online contribution on young maidens in Italy that underlined, once again, how far these questions travel beyond their apparent regional home.
If there is a direction for future meetings to consider, it would be to build more deliberately on the archives-and-heritage thread running through both days: several papers gestured towards partnerships between researchers and heritage practitioners without quite following through on what that collaboration should look like in practice, and a dedicated panel or workshop on this question would be a natural next step. The organisers closed with thanks and an invitation to reconvene, and on this evidence a follow-up event, or a themed publication drawing the two days’ papers together, would be well justified.