HCRI academic starts new ESRC-funded project on age and border policing
Dr Antoine Burgard has been awarded a 3-year grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. His project aims to offer the first history of border policing focusing on how age has become increasingly important to migration processes and experiences.
Dr Antoine Burgard, Senior Lecturer in History of Humanitarianism at the Humanitarian & Conflict Response Institute (HCRI), has been awarded an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) New Investigator project (2025-2028) for his project 鈥榃ho is a child? Determining age in British and French border policing, 1918 to the present鈥�.
After the publication of a report on the in July, Dame Angela Eagle, the immigration minister, controversially announced that the British government would test to verify ages of young asylum seekers. Today, being under or over 18 profoundly shapes how people in situations of migration are perceived and treated. Who gets to decided who should be recognised as a child is now one of the most pressing issues in public and policy debates around migration and asylum, in the UK but also in most Global North liberal democracies.
Even though they are more visible today, these debates around the use of age in border policing are not new. Using historical and anthropological case studies from 20th and 21st Century Britain and France, Dr Burgard鈥檚 project aims to better understand how and why age has become increasingly important not only to migration processes and experiences but also to the way policymakers and protection actors think about vulnerability.
For more on Dr Burgard鈥檚 academic work, visit .
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