SHCY Awards Antoine Burgard with 2021 Fass-Sandin Article Prize in English
Antoine Burgard, "Contested Childhood: Assessing the Age of Young Refugees in the Aftermath of the Second World War" History Workshop Journal vol. 92 (Autumn, 2021): 174-193.
Abstract: In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, identity documents and proofs of age were often lost or unavailable, bodies and behaviours had been marked by years of malnourishment and persecution, young people had learned to misrepresent their age for the sake of survival, and administrations routinely doubted age claims. The war had profoundly disrupted the system for knowing age that had become central to Western European regimes of recognition and rights such as citizenship, movement, and welfare. Using the resettlement of young Holocaust survivors to Canada after the war as its core case study, this article examines how state administrations, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations competed and struggled to determine age and consequently who should be considered as a child, and how young people themselves were affected by and navigated these struggles. It foregrounds the necessity to further historicize how power structures increasingly used childhood as a category and chronological age as a supposedly objective criterion to grant some lives more legitimacy than others.
Dr. Burgard is a Lecturer in Humanitarianism at the University of Manchester's Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute. He joined HCRI in 2017 as a postdoctoral fellow of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris. Burgard holds a History PhD from Université Lumière Lyon 2 and Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). His dissertation has received the Fondation Auschwitz (2018), the French Association for Canadian Studies (2018), the International Council for Canadian Studies (2019), and the UQAM’s Faculty of Humanities (2019) best doctoral thesis awards. His is also the winner of the 2017-18 SHCY Article Prize in French. He is currently developing a new project on age and migration control in Britain and France, in collaboration with the John Rylands Research Institute and the Centre for the History of Science Technology and Medicine in Manchester.
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The Prize Committee would also like to extend commendation to Heather Fitzsimmons Frey and Tania Gigliotti for their excellent article, “Let's Do the Time Warp Again:' Youth Interpreters at Fort Edmonton Park Performing Possibilities Across Time,” Theater Research in Canada v. 42 n. 2 (Fall 2021), 243-263.