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As the CRC 600 reaches the end of its third and final grant period, research projects B4 “Poverty and the Politics of Poverty in European Cities in the 19th and 20th centuries” and B5 “Poverty in Rural Regions between Welfare Politics, Charity and Self-Help during the Industrial Age (1860-1975)” will be hosting an international conference at the German Historical Institute in London from May 10 to 12 2012. Both projects have been intensely studying forms and characteristics of poverty in Europe from the 1830s to the 1970s. Instead of focusing on the well-researched macro-trends, the projects engage in local and regional case studies from a micro-perspective. Topics of interest include regional and local perceptions of poverty, everyday practices of granting and refusing relief, as well as the relations between public welfare, philanthropy and networks of solidarity. This also involves questions about processes of modernisation and professionalisation in local and regional welfare systems. At the same time the projects are looking at biographies of the poor as well as the agency and experiences of the poor themselves.
The conference is intended to facilitate the contextualisation of the projects’ findings in two ways. First, we aim to embed the results of our research into a wider geographical context. Second, we want to link our findings to methodological and theoretical discussions.
Programme:
Thursday, 10 May
Registration from 12.30pm
13.00-13.30 Introduction
13.30-15.15 Spatial Patterns
Comment: Lutz Raphael (University of Trier)
Chair: Beate Althammer (University of Trier)
Douglas Brown (King's College London): New Geographies of the New Poor Law in England and Wales
Mel Cousins (Caledonian University, Glasgow): Spatial Patterns of Poor Relief in Ireland, 1800-1914
Hans-Christian Petersen (University of Mainz): Who Owns the City? Possibilities and Limits of Creating Social Spaces ‘from below’ – St. Petersburg and London in Comparison (1840-1914)
Christiane Reinecke (Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Hamburg): Geographies of Poverty: Representing Marginality in Urban Space in West Germany and France, 1960-1990
15.15-15.45 Coffee
15.45-17.30 Rural Areas
Comment: Josef Ehmer (University of Vienna)
Chair: Tamara Stazic-Wendt (University of Trier)
Sonja Matter (University of Bern): "Neither Efficient nor Humane?" Social Welfare Practices in Rural Central Switzerland in the Early 20th Century
Elisabeth Grüner (University of Trier): Precarious Living in Times of Economic Boom. A Microperspective on Rural Poverty in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s
Susanne Hahn (University of Trier): "Structurally Weak" and "Backwards"? - Rural Areas in the Poverty-Policy Debates of the 1950s and 1960s
Marcel Boldorf (Ruhr-University Bochum): Social Welfare in Rural Brandenburg. Local Studies between the Legacy of World War II and the Rise of GDR-State Socialism
17.30-18.00 Coffee
18.00 Keynote
Serge Paugam (EHESS): Filiation, Organic Participation and Citizenship: Social Ties and Norms of Poverty Policies in Modern Welfare Regimes.
Friday, 11 May
9.00-10.45 Languages of Poverty
Comment: Gabriele Lingelbach (University of Bamberg)
Chair: Inga Brandes (University of Trier)
Paul André Rosental/Elodie Richard (ESOPP): Assistance and Protection of 'Vulnerable Populations': A Lexicometric Comparative Project
Hubertus Jahn (University of Cambridge): Voices from the Lower Depths: Russian Poor in their Own Words
Dorothee Lürbke (University of Freiburg): Seen with their Own Eyes: Self-Presentations of the Poor in Freiburg and Schwerin, 1950 - 1975
Andreas Gestrich/Daniela Heinisch (German Historical Institute London): “… They sit for days and have only their sorrow to eat”. Old Age Poverty in German Pauper Narratives
10.45-11.15 Coffee
11.15-13.00 Unemployment
Comment: Matthias Reiss (University of Exeter)
Chair: Susanne Hahn (University of Trier)
Tamara Stazic-Wendt (University of Trier): An Unbearable Social Existence. The Unemployed in (Rural) Poor Relief (Germany, 1918-1933)
Irina Vana (University of Vienna): The Unemployed and those Ineligible for Further Assistance. The Re-Assessment of Unemployment and Material Needs in the Process of the Establishment of Public Labour Offices (Austria, 1918-1938)
Elizabeth A. Scott (University of Saskatchewan): Unite Idle Men with Idle Land: The Evolution of the Hollesley Bay Training Farm Experiment for the London Unemployed, 1905 – 1908
Wiebke Wiede (University of Trier): The Poor Unemployed. Diagnoses of Unemployment in Britain and West Germany 1964–90
13.00-14.00 Lunch Break
14.00-15.30 Vagrancy and Homelessness
Comment: Sylvia Hahn (University of Salzburg)
Chair: Elisabeth Grüner (University of Trier)
Beate Althammer (University of Trier): Controlling Vagrancy.
Germany, England and France, 1880-1914
Sigrid Wadauer (University of Vienna): Tramps on Trial (Austria, 1920-1938)
Tehila Sasson (UC Berkeley): The Politics of Home: Homeless Families and Public Welfare in Post-War Britain
15.30-16.00 Coffee
16.00-17.45 Pauper Children
Comment: Alysa Levene (Oxford Brookes University)
Chair: Jens Gründler (IGM Stuttgart)
Katharina Brandes (University of Trier): Orphans, Pauper Children or Wayward Children? The Lives of Children Cared for by Public Institutions in Hamburg, 1892-1914
Ernst Guggisberg (State Archive Thurgau/ University of Basel):
Reducing Poverty Starts with Children: the Swiss Societies for Educating the Poor (Armenerziehungsvereine) in the 19th/20th Century
Friederike Kind-Kovacs (University of Regensburg): Save the (Hungarian) Children: WW I as a Trigger of Children's Social In/Exclusion
Nicoleta Roman (“Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History):
Living at the Edge of Society: Wallachian Orphans in the first half of the 19th Century
17.45-18.15 Coffee
18.15 Keynote
Steve King (University of Leicester): Why are the ‘Unworthy’ not Excluded from Poor Relief?
19.45 Dinner in the Library of the German Historical Institute
Saturday, 12 May
9.30-11.15 Institutions
Comment: Peter King (University of Leicester)
Chair: Katharina Brandes (University of Trier)
Jens Gründler (IGM Stuttgart): Care and Control. How Families Used Asylums, Glasgow 1875-1920
Tanja Rietmann (University of Bern): Detaining the Non-Criminal Poor. Coercive 19th and 20th Century Welfare Policies Towards Socially Deviant Men and Women in Switzerland
David R. Green (King's College London): Working the System: Pauper Communities and Plebeian Spaces in Mid-Nineteenth-Century London
Christina Vanja (Landeswohlfahrtsverband Hessen): The Juvenile on the Margins of Society – Public Education in Reformatories in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s and 1960s
11.15-11.45 Coffee
11.45-12.30 Final Discussion
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