Global humanitarianism and media culture PDF Download

Author: Michael Lawrence
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526117304
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This collection interrogates the representation of humanitarian crisis, catastrophe and care. Contributors explore the refraction of humanitarian intervention from the mid-twentieth century to the present across a diverse range of media forms, including screen media (film, television and online video), newspapers, memoirs, music festivals and social media platforms (notably Facebook, YouTube and Flickr). Examining the historical, cultural and political contexts that have shaped the mediation of humanitarian relationships since the middle of the twentieth century, the book reveals significant synergies between the humanitarian enterprise – the endeavour to alleviate the suffering of particular groups – and its media representations, particularly in their modes of addressing and appealing to specific publics.

Author: Ilan Kapoor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136178368
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
In the last two decades especially, we have witnessed the rise of ‘celebrity’ forms of global humanitarianism and charity work, spearheaded by entertainment stars, billionaires, and activist NGOs (e.g. Bob Geldof, Bono, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Bill Gates, George Soros, Save Darfur, Medeçins Sans Frontières). This book examines this new phenomenon, arguing that celebrity humanitarianism legitimates, and indeed promotes, neoliberal capitalism and global inequality. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s work, the book argues how celebrity humanitarianism, far from being altruistic, is significantly contaminated and ideological: it is most often self-serving, helping to promote institutional aggrandizement and the celebrity ‘brand’; it advances consumerism and corporate capitalism, and rationalizes the very global inequality it seeks to redress; it is fundamentally depoliticizing, despite its pretensions to ‘activism’; and it contributes to a ‘postdemocratic’ political landscape, which appears outwardly open and consensual, but is in fact managed by unaccountable elites.

Author: Gemma Houldey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000432556
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
The Vulnerable Humanitarian challenges the prevalence of stress and burnout culture within the aid sector, laying bare the issues of power, agency, security and wellbeing that continue to trouble organisations and staff. Engaging and insightful, this book illustrates the problematic and unrealistic expectations of aid workers through the archetype of the perfect humanitarian, and considers why burnout is so endemic, yet so rarely acknowledged, within aid organisations. The book provides practical means through which staff and managers can reflect upon and discuss damaging organisational cultures and behaviours, and develop a more inclusive and caring work environment. Drawing on original academic research and interviews with national and international aid workers and development experts, the book proposes a feminist, anti-racist and decolonial agenda in challenging oppressive systems and structures within the sector. With extensive professional experience as an aid worker herself, Gemma Houldey also shares her own struggles with mental health and what she has learned from feminist practices for self- and collective care. Proposing new ways of addressing wellbeing that are sensitive to the multi-faceted personalities and lived experiences of people working on aid and development programmes, The Vulnerable Humanitarian is essential reading both for current aid sector employees and for prospective employees and students.

Author: Shani Orgad
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745680852
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
This book is a clear, systematic, original and lively account of how media representations shape the way we see our and others’ lives in a global age. It provides in-depth analysis of a range of international media representations of disaster, war, conflict, migration and celebration. The book explores how images, stories and voices, on television, the Internet, and in advertisements and newspapers, invite us to relocate to distant contexts, and to relate to people who are remote from our daily lives, by developing ‘mediated intimacy’ and focusing on the self. It also explores how these representations shape our self-narratives. Orgad examines five sites of media representation – the other, the nation, possible lives, the world and the self. She argues that representations can and should contribute to fostering more ambivalence and complexity in how we think and feel about the world, our place in it and our relation to far-away others. Media Representations and the Global Imagination will be of particular interest to students and scholars of media and cultural studies, as well as sociology, politics, international relations, development studies and migration studies.

Author: Lilie Chouliaraki
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745664334
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
WINNER of the 2015 ICA Outstanding Book Award This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves. By showing historical change in Amnesty International and Oxfam appeals, in the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts, in the advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie as well as in earthquake news on the BBC, this far-reaching book shows how solidarity has today come to be not about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves – turning us into the ironic spectators of other people’s suffering.

Author: Fox, Andrew
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 146669968X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Media events have been described as broadcasts that involve an engaged audience viewing the same event simultaneously; though this definition is still relevant, the way media outlets interact with and react to their audiences has greatly changed. This is in part due to the emergence of social media platforms which allow a participatory audience, something that genre-specific television channels now rely on. Because these genre-specific, 24-hour channels seek to hook viewers with hyperbolic presentation and the illusion of large media events, the original definition must be adapted. Global Perspectives on Media Events in Contemporary Society seeks to re-define the role of the media in relaying information about current events within a modern context. Determining what constitutes as and the proper presentation of a media event is of great importance given the ubiquity of media consumption. This book approaches the topic from historical, ceremonial, and globally cultural perspectives while addressing news, sports, and other significant current events. It is a vital resource for students and teachers of communication, media, and journalism, professionals in the media industry, policy makers, and sociologists.

Author: Johannes Paulmann
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785339621
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
From Christian missionary publications to the media strategies employed by today’s NGOs, this interdisciplinary collection explores the entangled histories of humanitarianism and media. It traces the emergence of humanitarian imagery in the West and investigates how the meanings of suffering and aid have been constructed in a period of evolving mass communication, demonstrating the extent to which many seemingly new phenomena in fact have long historical legacies. Ultimately, the critical histories collected here help to challenge existing asymmetries and help those who advocate a new cosmopolitan consciousness recognizing the dignity and rights of others.

Author: Joël Glasman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000762599
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This book provides a historical inquiry into the quantification of needs in humanitarian assistance. Needs are increasingly seen as the lowest common denominator of humanity. Standard definitions of basic needs, however, set a minimalist version of humanity – both in the sense that they are narrow in what they compare, and that they set a low bar for satisfaction. The book argues that we cannot understand humanitarian governance if we do not understand how humanitarian agencies made human suffering commensurable across borders in the first place. The book identifies four basic elements of needs: As a concept, as a system of classification and triage, as a material apparatus, and as a set of standards. Drawing on a range of archival sources, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), and the Sphere Project, the book traces the concept of needs from its emergence in the 1960s right through to the present day, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call for “evidence-based humanitarianism.” Finally, the book assesses how the international governmentality of needs has played out in a recent humanitarian crisis, drawing on field research on Central African refugees in the Cameroonian borderland in 2014–2016. This important historical inquiry into the universal nature of human suffering will be an important read for humanitarian researchers and practitioners, as well as readers with an interest in international history and development.

Author: Lilie Chouliaraki
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315363488
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to research in the academic sub-field of humanitarian communication. It is broadly focused on communication that presents human vulnerability as a cause for public concern and encompasses communication with respect to humanitarian aid and development as well as human rights and "humanitarian" wars. Recent years have seen the expansion of critical scholarship on humanitarian communication across a range of academic fields, sharing recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of humanitarianism as an agent of transnational power, global governance and cosmopolitan solidarity. The Handbook brings into dialogue these diverse fields, their theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches as well as the public debates that lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism. It consolidates existing knowledge and maps out this emerging field as an important site of interdisciplinary knowledge production on media, communication and humanitarianism. As such, the Handbook is not simply a collection of texts sharing a similar theme. It is a coherent intellectual contribution which systematizes current critical scholarship in terms of Domains, Methods and Issues and sets an agenda of emerging and evolving research priorities in the field. Consisting of 26 chapters written by international scholars, who have contributed to laying the foundation of the field, this volume provides an essential guide to the key ideas, issues, concepts and debates of humanitarian communication.

Author: Daniel Robert DeChaine
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739112427
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the Crafting of Community, author Rob DeChaine explores a narrative common to the nongovernmental organization community about the promise and confusion of living together in post/modern times. Palpable in their affective admixture of idealism, fear, hope, anger and uncertainty, the protagonists of the story are humanitarian social actors, engaged in a vivid social drama. Their audience, as made apparent by DeChaine's excellent scholarship, is intimately engaged in the drama as well. According to DeChaine, the action takes shape in a multivocal polyphony of solidarity and, at times, cacophony of protest and dissent, with actors mobilizing symbolic resources in the service of uniting a public who would join with them in the cause. A major source of the actors' labor is symbolic, consisting in the successful rallying of formative energies in and around a cluster of key related terms, words and phrases, in order to dramatize and publicize the exigency of the crisis at hand. DeChaine argues that crises are embodied in the form of an intensifying hegemonic struggle over the articulation of 'community' in a global/ized world. The struggle brings into tension local and global priorities, national governments and civil society, and state-centered forms of identity and allegiance and a broad-based vision of global citizenship and belonging. DeChaine demonstrates that the crisis of community is one of the defining themes of our contemporary era, one that we ignore at our peril. This book is not only important to the NGO community but represents cutting edge analysis in rhetoric, cultural studies, semiotics, sociology and social organizations.