Professor Sabine Lee has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Seed Award, for her project ‘Life courses of Vietnamese GI-children’.

Evidence suggests that children born of war, those fathered by foreign soldiers and born to local mothers, have been and still are difficult to integrate into post-conflict societies. Professor Lee’s study (supported by a £49,978 award) will investigate three distinct cohorts of children fathered by American soldiers during the Vietnam War, tracking their life courses and testing their experiences of identity, stigma, discrimination, and childhood adversities, with a particular focus on mental and physical health.

The project will use SenseMaker, a research tool that can capture and analyse large numbers of individual stories, in order to understand complex changes, attitudes and experiences of children born of war.

This research will also assess the viability of this method of data collection for future investigations of children born of war, for example, World War II, the Balkan Wars, and African conflicts in the late 20th century. Professor Lee will be collaborating with UoB colleague Professor Bob McKelvey and Dr Susan Bartels (Queen’s University Belfast) for this one-year project, which starts in March 2016.