[ecrea] CFP: Technologies of Help: Transformations of Humanitarianism in the Age of the Internet

I am co-organizing a panel for the 2016 National Women’s Studies
Association (NWSA) <http://www.nwsa.org/>, to meet in Montreal, Quebec
between November 10-13, titled "Technologies of Help: Transformations of
Humanitarianism in the Age of the Internet." Please see panel
description below.

  If interested in proposing a paper for this panel, please reply to me
off list *with a 100-word abstract and a list of 3 bibliographical
entries *by *February 18th*. Thank you!

*CFP: Technologies of Help: Transformations of Humanitarianism in the
Age of the Internet*

The rise of information technologies has changed the form and scope of
humanitarian interventions, creating new models of humanitarianism that
span online communities and traditional humanitarian actors. New
modalities of “help” rely more often than not on the affordances of
social media and crowdsourcing platforms for widespread, immediate, and
efficient responses to humanitarian crises. Humanitarian actors often
mobilize the interactivity of Internet to disseminate information about
humanitarian disasters and events, to create petitions, and organize
funding campaigns at local and global levels. Moreover, crowdsourcing
platforms have become central to the ways in which human rights and
humanitarian groups collect information and interpret remote sensing
imagery from disaster areas. These new technologies of help produce new
humanitarian subjects – what Patrick Meier calls “digital humanitarians”
- who move swiftly between virtual and analog communities, challenging
both researchers and humanitarians alike to rethink traditional modes of
humanitarianism.

This panel aims to investigate critically the current state of
humanitarianism in an effort to map out the ways in which emerging
information technologies transform, facilitate or impede humanitarian
work. Bringing together two threads of research rarely considered
together – digital humanitarianism and critical humanitarian studies --
we inquire into new humanitarian mechanisms generated by emerging
software, even as we interrogate unequal power relations that have
always plagued humanitarianism as philosophy and practice. We take our
cue from important work in critical humanitarian studies that explores
the set of conditions facilitating humanitarian ideologies and practices
with an eye to unequal power relations at work in the field of
humanitarianism.

We understand humanitarianism to be both praxis and ideology,
constituted through multiple forms of intervention. Humanitarianism
includes acts as varied as international negotiations for determining
actors eligible for aid, including compromises and gains for helpers;
the deployment of military forces; collection, transportation, and
distribution of aid materials; and the circulation of charity discourses
and materials.

Humanitarian policies and practices construct entrenched understandings
of victims and perpetrators, and revolve around a set of values that
condition actual interventions on the ground and, more often than not,
reinforce existing forms of power. The humanitarian ideology is centered
on the notion of help conceived as the human obligation to relieve
someone from situations perceived to be intolerable and inhuman.

Yet humanitarianism is not only practice and ideology, but also what
Didier Fassin calls “a moral language,” a moral discourse that
presupposes particular understandings of humanity and suffering
subjects, even as it shapes the ways crises, wars, and rights violations
are understood and approached. Consequently, humanitarianism cannot be
understood outside the political entanglements that mark and shape its
practices and discourses. Finally, humanitarianism is deeply rooted in
the political economy of advanced capitalism and its values of
consumption, choice, and entrepreneurialism.

Taking into account above understandings of humanitarianism, we aim to
illuminate ethical, political, aesthetic, and technological dimensions
of humanitarianism, with an eye to emerging modalities of power and new
subjects that mark humanitarian practices in the 21^st Century. We
invite presentations that address but are not limited to the following
topics:


  * - Humanitarianism and information technologies
  * -Humanitarian interventions in the context of historical power
    relations between the Global North and the Global South
  * -Gender and Humanitarian Interventions
  * -Genealogies of humanitarian theories and practices
  * -The politics of representations
  * -Virtual and analog spaces of humanitarianism
  * -Affective economies of humanitarianism
  * -Humanitarian interventions and practices in advanced capitalism
  * -Celebrity culture and the entertainment industry
  * -Commodification of humanitarianism
  * -Global circulations of objects (print materials, used goods,
    medical supplies, clothing, garbage, etc.) and their impacts
  * -Environmental justice and humanitarian organizations
  * -New formations of power and gendered and racialized politics of
    humanitarian practices in the Global South
  * -The rise of digital humanitarianism
  * -Humanitarianism and crowdsourcing
  * -Humanitarianism and the nonprofit industrial complex
  * -Feminist decolonial approaches to humanitarianism
  * -Remote helping and microactions via technology
  * -Images of suffering, death, and displacement and their utilizations
    by humanitarian agencies
  * -Legal articulations of humanitarianism at global and local
    institutional levels
  * -Access and accessibility in the context of humanitarian technologies
  * -The business of doing good (profitability of humanitarianism)




Roxana Galusca, PhD
MSI Candidate ‘16
School of Information
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
http://rgalusca.com <http://rgalusca.com/>

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