Dr Claudia Soares
Historian and author
LATEST PROJECTS
In Care and After Care: Emotions, Institutions and Welfare
In Care and After Care: Emotions, Institutions, and Welfare in Britain, Australia and Canada, c. 1830-1930.
This project, generously funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, builds on my past work on children's care in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but takes a broader, global focus.
This research draws on ‘new’ imperial history approaches to explore the transnational circulation of childcare practices during a time when children’s rights and welfare were subjects of rigorous policy development across Britain, Australia and Canada.
The project also takes history of emotions approaches to examine children's care experiences, which remains a gap in scholarship to date.
A number of peer-reviewed articles, and a monograph are being prepared from this research project.
A Home from Home? Children's Social Care in Victorian and Edwardian Britain
A Home from Home? Children's Social Care in Victorian and Edwardian Britain is forthcoming, under contract with Oxford University Press. The book will provide a much-needed, detailed, and bottom-up study on institutionalised care for children in Britain from 1870-1920.
Calling upon a new body of evidence not yet examined in depth by historians – the
rich records of The Waifs and Strays Society (the second largest philanthropic children’s
residential institution established in the nineteenth century for destitute, outcast, and
friendless children, and which continues to operate today as The Children’s Society) – it
offers fresh perspectives on the history of children’s care, and reveals the significance of
specific types of caring practices that held particular cultural and ideological meanings. The
book integrates material culture and social history approaches to produce a new type of study
of children's institutional care, which challenges existing orthodoxies and complicates the
way in which we think about institutional childhood. By asking different questions of
surviving sources, the book considers how a sense of belonging, individuality, and
attachment were created in the children's institution through the examination of the key
narratives of home and family. Central to the book's argument is that home, family, and
belonging were significant dimensions to the institutional objectives of rescue and reform.
Despite underpinning the policies and practices of many institutions’ at the time, these
aspects of childcare ideology have been largely ignored by historians.
The book offers a radical rethink about the role, function, value and experiences of
children’s residential care, historically, making it unique in the existing historiography of
children’s care. By placing children’s experiences and subjectivities centrally, and by giving
expression to the voices and feelings of children, the book offers a more balanced view of the
range and diversity of care in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. the book will complicate understandings of the relationships between institutions and inmates, and the social and cultural worlds of institutional inhabitants, thus providing a different perspective on child welfare history.