News
New Marie Skłodowska-Curie Project at the School of History and the Radical Humanities Laboratory
Welcome to Dr Aisling Shalvey who has joined the School of History as a MSCA fellow under the mentorship of Dr Kylie Thomas for the project UCARE1945 (Unaccompanied Children’s Access to Healthcare (1945-1950))
- UCARE1945 examines issues relating to access to healthcare and financial compensation for medical harm done during the Second World War and explores how such practices have shaped ways of understanding care for refugees.
- Dr Shalvey's project will consider how discrimination based on age, statehood and gender played a role in pathways to healthcare in the immediate postwar era and will focus on the life narratives of child survivors of the Holocaust.
- It will be the first project to identify and analyse the life narratives of child survivors in relation to access to healthcare, combining research with archival sources, medical data, and lived experiences.
Among the approximately ten thousand records in the Arolsen Archives are identity documents and narratives of child survivors, many of whom suffered from malnutrition, trauma and typhus in the aftermath of the war. This study will identify and analyse a selection of this archival material in order to chart the life histories of some of these young survivors. This project aims to expand knowledge of the complex issues child refugees faced in the immediate aftermath of World War II and will investigate how antisemitism and other forms of racism affected health care.
These issues remain relevant today in the light of the resurgence of antisemitism and xenophobia in Europe and this project aims to contribute to the EU strategy on combating antisemitism and other forms of racism, with links to sustainable development goals SDG5 and 10. UCARE1945 will take place at University College Cork (UCC) under the supervision of Dr Kylie Thomas, an international expert in the field of gender history, medical humanities, and representations of the Holocaust.
The project Unaccompanied Children’s Access to Healthcare (1945-1950) will run from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2027. Dr Shalvey will examine investigate how issues of gender, age, and language impacted medical care for unaccompanied minors during the years 1945 to 1950. The central research question asks: what factors influenced medical care for unaccompanied children in the immediate postwar era, and to what extent did these factors affect the care they received? Rather than approaching the history of medical care in the aftermath of the Holocaust solely through statistics and medical records, she will draw on life narratives and read them alongside these other forms of archival materials to consider how children’s life experiences were documented or erased in the archive.
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For more information please contact AShalvey@ucc.ie thank you