At the annual meeting of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2021, Academy Research Fellow Katja Uusihakala from the University of Helsinki presented a lecture titled: “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.
