Charity Begins at Home: Approaches to the History of Domestic Space and Voluntary Action

Postgraduates and early career researchers are invited to propose papers for this one day workshop. We welcome papers that discuss the speaker’s experience addressing  issues in their own research on charity and the home.


Voluntarism in the domestic sphere presents particular methodological and evidential challenges. The aim of the event is to encourage an open and

friendly forum for discussion on problems and possible solutions that researchers have encountered or anticipate, and for collective discussion on possible solutions and methodologies. Submissions are invited from all periods and locations. Papers might address the relationship between charity and the home in diverse ways:

• Charity emanating from the home, e.g., the home as a location for fundraising, a place for coordinating charity, the locus of collective action by families or neighbours
• Charity targeting the home, e.g., social work, religious outreach, benevolent funds), or as charity for those rejected from the home, e.g., unmarried mothers, foundlings
• Charity as the home, e.g., almshouses, nursing homes, hospices, or places of refuge and boarding

Registration is now open until 21 March 2010. To register, please contact Stephen Soanes workshops@vahs.org.uk