The »distant Child«: Religious Engagement and the Globalization of the Family, 1840-1930

• Applicant: Dr. Katharina Stornig
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2013 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 242772659

This project examines the religious engagement with »distant children« in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries using the example of three transnational associations of different Christian confessions (Werk der Heiligen Kindheit, Norddeutsche Mission und St. Petrus Claver Sodalität). It is the goal of this study to highlight the previous history of the well-known international children`s relief organizations in the twentieth century, to examine the importance of the global entanglements of these religious associations in the history of transnational aid and to identify the special role that children and imaginations of children and the child-parent relationship played in this context. By focusing on the religious aid for »distant children« in nineteenth century Germany, the project aims to demonstrate the crucial importance of changing social constructions of childhood and the family in the framework of the history of transnational aid. In doing so it extends the emerging field of research on the history of humanitarianism to include another facet.Based on the historiographies on European imaginations of children and conceptions of childhood, this project first analyses the conditions under which perceptions of »distant children« as persons in need, whether for religious, physical or material reasons, mobilized individuals and groups in Germany to come to their aid. Therefore, it examines the emergence, universalization and expansion of the religious and secular concepts, values and norms that facilitated aid for children across national, cultural, ethnic and religious boundaries. Secondly, this project examines the practices of transnational aid and »caring over distance«. It particularly focuses on the emergence and proliferation of an individualized and personalized practice of aid that was applied by the Christian associations being examined: transnational child sponsorship. Thirdly, this project examines the effects of engagement with »distant children« on those providing aid in Germany. It particularly aims to explore the ways in which »aiding« shaped and ordered the social worlds and perceptions of transnational and global relations of those individuals and communities that provided assistance. Therefore, this project focuses on the relational aspects of giving and taking, and it examines the emotional and imagined relationships and sense of connection over large geographic distance that this type of transnational aid (re-)produced.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants