Tamara Myers & Georgia Twiss

Tamara Myers & Georgia Twiss, “The Rising (Street) Generation: The Vancouver Runaway Revolution and 1970s Child Saving”. Urban History Review, vol. 53 no. 2, 2025, p. 157-180.

Myers and Twiss’ article uses the rise of runaways in the 1960s and 70s to explore new models of youth reform and child “rescue” in Vancouver. The committee was particularly impressed by the way the work bridges Victorian-era child-saving – with its roots in citizenship formation and settler futurity – to the efforts of the Vancouver Children’s Aid Society and the experimental advocacy models – such as Cool Aid and the Gastown Team – that emerged in response to its failures. Through meticulous research, Myers and Twiss illuminate how reform ideals initially centered on children’s rights and street-level intermediary work gradually became more coercive, shifting toward the containment of the “public” runaway. This work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of child rescue, rights, and reform institutions in Canada.

HONOURABLE MENTION: 

Jane Nicholas, “The Lives of Infamous Children: Living Children’s Roles in Cases of Suspicious Infant Deaths and Infanticide in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Ontario.”  Journal of Family History, vol 53 no. 4, 2025, p. 359-374.

Nicholas’ article is a richly detailed and impressively researched foray into the effects of infanticide cases on the experiences of living children and youth. This highly original work encourages readers to consider young people in roles that they are not often thought to occupy, and to engage the limits of the archive by seeking their voices in unlikely places. By examining their roles as witnesses in criminal investigations, or as advocates for a criminalized mother, Nicholas effectively shows how even fragmentary records can reveal intimate and important histories of children and youth.