Drawing from early twentieth century documents from the Home for Destitute Children in Burlington, Vermont, USA, I explore the notion of the archive as a site of knowledge, politics, and ethics. Despite the absence of children's own perspectives in this archive, I propose taking a geographical relational poverty approach to gain insights by examining power relations between middle-class adult women and ‘destitute’ children. Specifically, I use records generated by women in charge of the Home (the matrons and the Board of Directors) to identify three dimensions of relational relevance. First, the women exerted power in constructing the Home as a place through ordering temporal rhythms, influencing sensory experiences, and imposing social boundaries and material conditions. Second, I review discourses such as the ‘desirable child’, ‘innocence’, and eugenicist notions of ‘feeblemindedness’ employed by the women to ‘fix’ children, both to repair them and to keep them in place. Third, I provide a reflection on the possibilities of combining manuscript archives with digitized sources such as the census to uncover adults' production and containment of ‘destitute children’.

中文翻译：

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“修复”贫困儿童：通过档案了解二十世纪初儿童之家的关系地理学

我借鉴美国佛蒙特州伯灵顿贫困儿童之家二十世纪初的文件，探讨了档案馆作为知识、政治和道德场所的概念。尽管该档案中缺乏儿童自己的观点，但我建议采取地理关系贫困方法，通过研究中产阶级成年女性和“贫困”儿童之间的权力关系来获得见解。具体来说，我使用负责护理之家的女性（护士长和董事会）生成的记录来确定关系相关性的三个维度。首先，女性通过安排时间节奏、影响感官体验、强加社会界限和物质条件，发挥权力，将家庭建设为一个场所。其次，我回顾了妇女用来“修复”孩子的“理想的孩子”、“纯真”和优生学的“弱智”概念等话语，既修复他们又让他们保持在适当的位置。第三，我反思了将手稿档案与人口普查等数字化来源相结合的可能性，以揭示成年人对“贫困儿童”的生产和遏制。