Listening to British Child Migrants’ Voices: A New Concept for Studying the History of Young People

Using the example of children and juveniles sent to Canada and Australia under the British child migration schemes (1869–1970), I propose ‘voice’ as a useful concept for studying the history of young people. Critiquing the use of voice as a self-explanatory metaphor for the authentic self or the democratic empowerment of a liberal subject, I reconceptualise voice by distinguishing four interconnected transforming processes – raising, recording, archiving, and excavating voices – and by considering the different dimensions and forms of voices. I take into account the dimensions of sound, narrative, and practice, and consider the forms of Mitsprache, speech, singing, writing, and bodily performance. In doing so, I am able to gain new insights into the development of ideas about young people and young people’s rights over the course of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century, as well as into how British child migrants perceived, navigated, and communicated their experiences and into their construction of new identities in the process.