On 23 and 24 March , the John Rylands Research Institute and Library hosted a major conference ‘Compassion and Care: Emotions and Experience in the Care of Children through History’, co-organised by Dr Kate Gibson, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at The University of Manchester, and Dr Claudia Soares, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and NUAcT Fellow at Newcastle University.

The conference reconsidered the long history of children’s care in light of recent independent care reviews that have taken place in Scotland, and England and Wales, which provide new opportunities to reassess histories of care.

Attended by forty delegates in person and many more online, the conference was cross-disciplinary, with international speakers from across the humanities and social science disciplines, as well as archivists, social work practitioners, and professionals representing major care organisations, including Who Cares? Scotland and The Care Leavers’ Association. Our panels focused on the archives of care, the ethics and practice of care research, parish and kinship care, maternal care, the impacts of colonisation and race on care practice and experience, the legacies of care experience, and the materiality and inheritance of care experience. Several speakers drew on their own personal experiences of care to help make connections between care in the past and present, while other papers highlighted the importance of the emotional labour required of care professionals in providing different forms of care across the ages.

As part of the conference, a public collections encounter was organised by curators and archivists at the John Rylands Library, to showcase the archives of care held in the University of Manchester’s special collections. Institutional material on display related to children’s homes run by George Müller and Manchester’s Wood Street Mission, which continues to improve the life chances of children and families living in poverty today.

A public roundtable brought scholars of care together with care-experienced speakers and care professionals to reflect on the new directions that might be taken in research on the history of children’s care over time. This discussion, and the conference more broadly, demonstrated both the timeliness and relevance of focusing on the diversity of care relationships and experiences in the past, which have implications for how we are to imagine a caring society and ethics of care in the future.