Dear members of FAS,
The annual meeting of the Finnish Anthropological Society will be held on March 29, at 17.00 – 19.30. The meeting will be organized online via Zoom.
If you are unable to participate online, you can join the meeting at Tieteiden talo (Kirkkokatu 6, Helsinki) room 309. Only six people are allowed to be in the room. Therefore, if you wish to go there, please register by 22.3.2021 by email mari.korpela@nulltuni.fi
No registration is required if you participate via Zoom. https://tuni.zoom.us/j/65488330995…
Meeting ID: 654 8833 0995
Passcode: 700686
In the beginning, Academy Research Fellow Katja Uusihakala (University of Helsinki) will give a lecture titled: “Children’s Best Interests?” Shifting visions of worthy lives in British child migration. For the abstract, please see the bottom of this page.
The award for the Anthropological Act of the year 2020 will also be given in the meeting.
The lecture will be given in English but the actual annual meeting will be in Finnish. For the meeting agenda please see this site (in Finnish).
Welcome!
Dr. Katja Uusihakala (University of Helsinki)
“Children’s Best Interests?” Shifting visions of worthy lives in British child migration
Abstract:
This paper examines a British child migration scheme – a project that sent and resettled select, white children from the UK to colonial Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962 – as an example for analyzing temporally shifting visions and evaluations related to ideas about “children’s best interests”. The paper focuses on affective state processes at two specific historical moments. I first consider the political and moral values at play in rationalizing and motivating the migration project as it was launched in the aftermath of the Second World War. Secondly, I discuss the re-examination of children’s best interests and worthy lives in a state apology in 2010. First projected as embodiments of imperial hope and futurity, in present discourses of repentance, the child migrants are depicted as symbols of loss and victims of failed and misguided state policies.
