The Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network (AHN) invites participants to submit a paper abstract for a two-day workshop titled “Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism” at the University of Manchester from 13-14 July, 2023.
The workshop is sponsored by the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI). You do not need to be an EASA member to participate in the workshop, but you are requested to join the AHN mailing list. Online participation will be possible.
Please submit a 250-word abstract of your paper to ahn.easa@gmail.com by 15th May, 2023. Selected participants will be notified shortly thereafter.
Workshop concept note
Thanks to EASA and HCRI, we will be able to provide financial support to a small number of participants for travel and accommodation expenses. Priority will be given to early career, precarious, and independent scholars. Please indicate in your abstract if you would require travel funding.
The police killing of George Floyd in the United States restaged conversations about structural racism, antiblackness and white supremacy as problems not just situated in American history but global in scope and import. The humanitarian sector was no exception to this moment, with practitioners renewing calls to decolonize the sector and rebalance power differentials between local and international staff (Majumdar 2020; The New Humanitarian 2020). Since the emergence of humanitarianism as a distinct field of study, scholars have drawn attention to how the institution is imbricated in colonial taxonomies of social difference and positional privilege, which structure encounters between aid workers and aid recipients (Cole 2012; Harrell-Bond 2002; Fassin 2007, 2012). Forced migration studies has also produced extensive accounts of the stigmatization and racialization of refugees, markers that remain even after the legal status of refugeehood has ended. What remains under-explored, however, are the ways in which these taxonomies produce humanitarian practice itself, its guiding principles and moral dispositions, its internal economies and institutional processes, the symbologies of humanitarian representation and the ecologies of spectatorship for which they are designed. Part of the problem, as a growing body of scholarship has noted (Benton 2016; De Genova 2017; Pallister-Wilkins 2021), is with humanitarianism’s underlying concept of the human itself, whose normative universalism often occludes questions of difference from being posed, and specifically elides race as a central organizing logic through which the human is cognized, persecuted, abandoned or saved.
This workshop invites papers that unsettle humanitarian genealogies of the human by exploring how taxonomies of difference operate in humanitarian ethics, imaginaries and praxis globally. This can include, but is not limited to, themes such as:
- How are taxonomies of difference invoked and deployed in humanitarian principles, policymaking and programming?
- How does race undergird norms of professionalism and discursive claims to expert authority in humanitarian organizations?
- Is humanitarianism a white supremacist enterprise, and how do “non-Western” etiologies of race alter or interrupt this framing?
- What role does global antiblackness specifically, rather than white saviorism alone, play in the determination of humanitarian rights and entitlements?
- Are the aesthetic modes of humanitarian visualization oriented towards predominantly white, Western viewing publics, and how are these modes disrupted by new media and diversification of the global public sphere?
Do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions.
Warmly,
Malay and Pedro
EASA Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network 