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 2024.
GRACE ABBOTT BOOK PRIZE FOR THE BEST BOOK IN ENGLISH
WINNER
Divya Kannan, Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Today, the southwestern Indian state of Kerala is routinely praised for its exceptionally high literacy rate and educational system. In Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala, Divya Kannan looks beyond the region's present-day reputation to unearth its long and often violent history of conflict over education and who should be able to access it. Her analysis is admirably centered on understudied poor children, defined not only in economic terms but as members of “oppressed castes and religious communities.”
Sweeping in scope, Contested Childhoods begins in the early nineteenth century, when newly arrived Protestant missionaries encountered diverse indigenous educational practices, along with intense caste prejudice that made the ideal of a universal educational system seem untenable. Kannan’s scholarly rigor is evident in her focus on both British and German-Swiss missionaries, as well as her attention to how large gender loomed in shaping schools for both girls and boys. In the end, she argues that the significance of missionary schools extended beyond the relatively small numbers of children they served; they had a “multiplier effect” that influenced how all groups thought about the benefits of education. At the same time, by establishing segregated schools for poor children, missionaries in some ways reified caste divisions and “allowed the state to defer fulfilling its overall welfarist obligation.”
Deftly negotiating a large cast of characters over a long swath of time, Kannan situates the history of education and evolving conceptions of childhood within the multilayered and ever-evolving context of political and economic transformation. She is also to be applauded for having produced a fascinating and nuanced history of a highly complex region. Contested Childhoods never generalizes or simplifies, remaining attentive to divisions and distinctions within the local population and among the colonizers alike. Finally, the committee appreciated how Contested Childhoods creatively reads missionary sources to get at the experiences of poor children. By unpacking examples of children negotiating educational spaces and interacting with adults, Kannan shows how they exercised “fleeting agency” within the “emotional habitus” of their schools. For all of these reasons, the committee unanimously deems Contested Childhoods highly deserving of the Grace Abbott Book Prize.
Honorable Mention
Elena Jackson Albarrán, Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas. Leiden: Brill, 2024.
A creatively constructed and beautifully illustrated book, Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas explores how both the metaphor of childhood and actual children and adolescents shaped transnational relations in the 1930s and 1940s. In the face of global authoritarian threats, the U.S. eschewed military intervention in Latin America in favor of pursuing “soft power” through commercial and cultural exchange. Yet even as the Good Neighbor era took hold, conceptions of the region as underdeveloped, primitive, and dependent remained potent. Albarrán offers a nuanced analysis of these enduring tropes, complemented by a series of evocative case studies. These include the role of Mexican indigenous art and the marketing of children’s paintings in the U.S.; the experiences of Spanish Republican children sent to Mexico and celebrated as “orphans” rescued by a former colony turned proud revolutionary state; and the promotion of Pan-Americanism through youth-centered cultural activities, commemoration, and diplomacy.
The committee honors Good Neighbor Empires as an ambitious and compelling work that skillfully combines macro-level analysis of discourse and geopolitics with richly detailed, micro-historical narratives. Throughout the book, Albarrán brings her young subjects to life as they paint, perform, write letters, and speak to reporters—eluding or exceeding the roles prescribed for them in wonderfully idiosyncratic ways.
FASS-SANDIN ARTICLE PRIZE IN ENGLISH
WINNER
Juandrea Bates, “Wayward Daughters and Unnatural Fathers: Generational Conflict, Youth Culture, and Parental Authority in Buenos Aires, 1890-1930,” in Gossage & Moore, eds., Family and Justice in the Archives: Historical Perspectives on Intimacy and the Law (Concordia University Press, 2024).
This book chapter examines how industrialization, urban expansion, and the emergence of formalized wage labor in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires created new opportunities for young people to assert their freedom from parental control in civil courts. Bates offers insightful analysis and in-depth contextualization of court cases in which young litigants dramatically reversed the courts’ longstanding tendency to uphold patriarchal authority over their children. In pointing to these shifts in the agency of young people, the author makes significant contributions to imagining young people’s subjectivities in relation to their newfound economic power and the changing social world of the city. Additionally, the writing is especially pleasurable to read, and the author shows fluency with a range of interdisciplinary theories. This is a must read for historians of childhood and youth!
Honorable Mention
Alexandra Giancarlo and Janice Forsyth, “Indigenous Visual History: Remembering ‘Us’ in Indian Residential School Hockey Photographs,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 34:1 (2024).
In examining the history of residential school sports programs geared toward assimilating Indigenous children into Canadian national culture, Giancarlo and Forsyth employ the innovative method of visual repatriation. In this case, visual repatriation entailed the returning of historic photographs to the Indigenous children (now adults) featured in these photos to understand their (re)interpretation of these experiences. The authors’ sophisticated analysis foregrounded Indigenous epistemologies by focusing on the photographed individuals’ embodied memories of the scenes as a response to colonial intentions and interventions. Though not necessarily written for a history of childhood audience, the authors’ analysis of both photographic evidence and oral history has much to offer the field.
SHCY DISSERTATION AWARD
WINNER
Dr. Susanne Quitmann, “Reconceptualising Voice: An Exploratory Case Study of British Child Migrants (1869-1970),” Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Dr. Susanne Quitmann’s dissertation, “Reconceptualising Voice: An Exploratory Case Study of British Child Migrants (1869-1970),” is not only an illuminating examination of the history of British child migration schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also a sophisticated methodological and theoretical intervention that cuts to the roots of humanities research by addressing the multifaceted issue of “voice.” During the roughly one-hundred-year period the dissertation covers, the United Kingdom sent disadvantaged children and youth to the colonies—primarily to Australia and Canada—hoping to improve their prospects. By mining related ego documents, bureaucratic and public records, and oral history surveys, Quitmann argues for reconceptualizing “voice” as an analytical tool and heuristic device, not simply as a metaphor for agency. In doing so, Quitmann perceptively pulls together Childhood Studies, Subaltern Studies, and Gender Studies to demonstrate that deploying voice as a methodological tool allows for insight into the social structures within which one’s voice echoes, the individual subjectivities of child migrants, and instructive archival silences. The dissertation’s chapters address such themes as letter writing, speech, music, and the body as realms that shape one’s voice. This dissertation not only elucidates children’s experiences of emigration, but also asks historians to think in new and nuanced ways about how we approach our sources and utilize “voice” as a concept.
Honorable Mention
Dr. Catherine Gay, “Girls in nineteenth-century Victoria, Australia: A material history,” The University of Melbourne.
The committee would also like to recognize Dr. Catherine Gay’s incisive and eminently readable dissertation, “Girls in nineteenth-century Victoria, Australia: A material history,” as an honorable mention. Gay creatively utilizes material culture, or “girl-produced sources,” to argue for the importance of girls and girlhood within the settler-colonial society of Australia. Gay demonstrates that the sources for nineteenth-century girlhood are plentiful if only we turn our attentive eye to the material objects girls produced. These objects illustrate not only girls’ own emotional experiences and cultural contributions but also the various ways girls might destabilize or uphold the social order of an empire. Gay’s work also addresses the intersectional elements—for example, religion, race, and class—that shaped girls’ experiences and their source-producing abilities, thus demonstrating the importance of addressing both indigenous and colonial girlhoods together for understanding the power dynamics at play in settler colonialism.
The Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) is also pleased to announce the biennial prizewinners for the best articles on the history of children, childhood, or youth (broadly construed) published in 2023 or 2024:
Best article prize in Italian:
Barbara Montesi, "Alla ricerca di Shirley Temple? Cinema, celebrity culture e infanzia nell’Italia fascista,” Storia e Problema Contemporanei (2023).
The decision was based on the following reason: the article is grounded extensively on both national and international literature; furthermore, the author employs a clear and precise argumentative style, and explores a previously unexamined area of research. As a result, she achieved original results.
Best article prize in French:
Aliénor Asselot, “Apprivoiser la mort de l’enfant par la photographie dans l’Espagne de la seconde moitié du 19e siècle. Étude à partir de la collection de la Biblioteca Nacional de España,” Frontières (2024).
The jury was convinced by Aliénor Asselot's paper, which adressed an original and new subject fully in line with the history of childhood. Asselot presented this topic with great clarity and pedagogy while employing a rigorous method. Combining the approaches of material history, the history of techniques, and the history of sensibilities and representations, her article proposes a social history of childhood that sheds new light on family life, Spanish society's relationship with death, and the material culture of the Spanish bourgeoisie. We acknowledge the relevance and richness of this historiographical dialogue.
L’article d’Alienor Asselot a su convaincre le jury par son objet original et neuf, qui s'inscrit pleinement en histoire de l'enfance et qu’elle présente avec beaucoup de clarté et de pédagogie, tout en mobilisant une méthode rigoureuse. Son article conjugue les approches de l'histoire matérielle et de l'histoire des techniques avec celle de l'histoire des sensibilités et des représentations, et propose une histoire sociale de l’enfance qui fournit ainsi des éclairages neufs sur le quotidien des liens familiaux, le rapport de la société espagnole à la mort et la culture matérielle de la bourgeoisie espagnole. Nous avons ainsi voulu saluer la pertinence et la richesse de ce dialogue historiographique.
Best article prize in Spanish:
Ludmila Scheinkman, “Violencia contra las infancias, masculinidad y formación de una cultura infantil-juvenil entre varones de clase obrera en la llanura pampeana argentina, principios del siglo XX,” Annuario Columbiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 51:2 (2024).
This article addresses a key issue, violence, from a fresh angle by focusing on masculinity in childhood and youth among the working classes. The committee praised the robustness of the research, the analytical and conceptual skills, and the work with documentary sources. The text stood out for its fluidity and clarity of writing, as well as its methodology. It uses autobiographical sources that have been little explored in the history of Latin American childhood, with an approach that will be useful for future research.
The result is an original text that reveals the naturalization of violence, its significance in the lives of children and young people, and its importance in shaping their masculinity in the context of migration and social change in the early 20th century.
El jurado en forma unánime resolvió premiar el artículo “Violencia contra las infancias, masculinidad y formación de una cultura infantil-juvenil entre varones de clase obrera en la llanura pampeana argentina, principios del siglo XX” de Ludmila Scheinkman.
Se trata de un artículo sobre una cuestión clave, como es la violencia, la que aborda con un ángulo renovador al colocar el foco sobre la masculinidad en la infancia y la juventud en las clases trabajadoras. El jurado valoró la solidez de la investigación, la capacidad analítica y conceptual y el trabajo de fuentes documentales. El texto se destaca por la fluidez y la claridad de la escritura al igual que por la metodología. Utiliza fuentes autobiográficas escasamente exploradas por la historia de la infancia latinoamericana, con un enfoque que será de utilidad para futuras investigaciones.
El resultado es un texto original que revela la naturalización de la violencia, su significación en las vidas de los niños y jóvenes a la vez que su importancia en la conformación de su masculinidad en el contexto de migración y cambios sociales de comienzos del siglo XX.
Fass-Sandin Prize (Nordic Region):
Hege Stormark, “Barndom og følelser i Stavanger rundt år 1900,” Heimen 61:2 (2024)
In this beautifully written article, Hege Stormark takes us on a journey into the childhood landscape of the industrial city of Stavanger in early 20th-century Norway. Stormark’s main source is a semiautobiographical novel by Karsten Roedder (1901–1986), a Norwegian-American journalist and author who lived in Stavanger’s ‘east end’ until the age of 14, at which time he signed on to a ship to America. Stormark creatively uses Roedder’s novel as an empirical starting point for exploring what it might have felt like for a young boy to grow up in a working-class neighborhood characterized by poverty, hard labor, and a wide range of challenging emotional circumstances. Her study is highly original and methodologically innovative, successfully balancing the local historical context and meaningful engagement with international scholarly discourse. Particularly insightful is the way Stormark applies the concept of emotional practice as a way to examine the interplay between emotional expressions and sociocultural structures. The article also touches upon broader intersecting themes, such as class, power, religion, and gender, especially by looking at how childhood and emotions intertwine with these different domains. These theoretical perspectives are clearly presented and integrated into the analysis of her sources. The article is well-structured and easy to follow, with theoretically sophisticated themes being discussed in accessible language. Stormark’s article successfully combines childhood studies, social history, literary analysis, and sociocultural approaches with emotional practices, making it inspiring reading for a broad audience.
The Best Article Prize published in German in 2023-24 was not awarded in 2025.