The Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) is pleased to announce the prizewinners for the best publications and dissertation on the history of children, childhood, or youth (broadly construed) published in 2025. The recipient of the Grace Abbott Book Prize will be announced soon!
FASS-SANDIN ARTICLE PRIZE IN ENGLISH
WINNER
Tamara Myers and Georgia Twiss, "The Rising (Street) Generation: The Vancouver Runaway Revolution and 1970s' Child Saving," Urban History Review 53, 2 (2025): 157-180.
Citation - This article makes a significant contribution to the field of the History of Childhood and Youth through its seamless and innovative connection of the history of child welfare movements with runaway youth of the 1970s. It reveals how the figure of the ‘runaway’ youth was constructed in the popular imagination in 1960s and 1970s Canada, and how welfare workers’ initial efforts to respond to ‘runaways’ through the lens of youth advocacy ultimately returned to familiar patterns of policing youth. Myers and Twiss illustrate that despite perceiving themselves as modern, progressive, and professional, the people working in welfare programs designed to assist ‘runaways’ replicated the patterns of the nineteenth-century child rescue movement: actively shaping the discursive construction of a ‘problem’ population of children and youth, justifying their proposed interventions through a supposedly child-centred philosophy, and applying techniques of coercion and control when this ‘problem’ population appeared resistant to change. In so doing, the work invites historians to consider how the well-studied tropes of childhood and youth of earlier periods might be constructively applied to extend understandings of more recent decades.
Honorable Mention
Tuva Skjelbred Nodeland, "Working-Class Internationalism through Children's Eyes: The International Experiences of Norwegian Young Pioneers in the Interwar Period," The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 18, 2 (2025): 124-248.
Citation - Nodeland's article makes a significant contribution to the field of the History of Childhood and Youth by centering Norwegian children within a global network connecting local activism in schools and communities with international social struggle and political internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on children's published correspondence in the Norwegian Pioneer press, the article illustrates "some of the ways interwar communist internationalism was understood and used by Norwegian children," whose political awareness was marked by "an international reach, focusing on other events than their teachers were preoccupied with, or providing alternative interpretations of ongoing international affairs." By clearly explaining the limitations and possibilities of adult-mediated sources, Nodeland's meticulous research contributes to the study of political socialization and the negotiation of global ideological frameworks by children themselves, a valuable model for historians seeking to recover childhood agency from the archives.
2026 LAURA LOVETT DISSERTATION AWARD
WINNER
Anaïs Faurt, "Neither Safe nor Sound: Child Protection at the End of the French Empire, 1949-1979," Rutgers University-New Brunswick, 2025.
Citation: One of this dissertation's greatest strengths is its ability to uncover the complex relationship between humanitarianism and child protection in the final decades of the French empire. Rather than existing outside politics, humanitarian and legal initiatives frequently served imperial objectives, reinforcing racial hierarchies and generating new forms of discrimination that caused both discursive and material harm to children and their families. Ambitious in scope - the work contains French, Vietnamese, and Malagasy-language archival material from the colonial metropole of France and three other African and Asian sites – “Neither Safe nor Sound” is revelatory in showing how programs designed to protect children were also intricately imbricated with France's effort to preserve its empire, and with French efforts to subvert humanitarian discourses for its own agendas. The author shows tremendous craft in weaving these different contexts together for a nuanced and riveting trans-imperial story of how "child protection" was transformed in the crucible of decolonization following the end of World War II.
Drawing on children's writings, drawings, and other child-generated sources, the dissertation seeks to recover children's voices, lived realities, and agency. At the same time, the author does not valorize or romanticize these children. Instead, their experiences are situated alongside French official representations and depictions, producing a sophisticated and deeply nuanced account that captures the complexity of colonial childhoods and the competing narratives that surrounded them.