CfP: Regarding the Pain of Others What emotions have to do in the History of Humanitarian Images?
Taking the
title of Susan Sontag’s seminal work as a starting point, this workshop aims at
re-opening an old debate about the potentialities of exhibiting other’s
suffering in order to promote a culture of peace, prevent war and/or resolve
conflict. Sontag concluded in her book that images of atrocities had led the
Global North to a form of exhaustion, also called compassion fatigue, which has
been criticised more recently as a myth. Yet, images remain today the main
strategy of humanitarian organisations to raise awareness and funds. In this
workshop we would like to propose considering the importance of images (not
only photographs, but also drawings as well as motion pictures) within the
long-term history of humanitarianism, in order to explore the role of emotions
in shaping and mobilising public opinion. More particularly, we encourage
scholars to think about the ways through which humanitarian images affect us as
material objects that have expressive effects related to the circuits, places
or circumstances in which they are exhibited. This perspective gives us the
possibility to read humanitarian images as cultural, social and political
practices implemented by actors (individual or collective) in a specific
historical context. By engaging emotions with images, we seek to understand
what they have done in the history of humanitarian relief, rather than merely
looking at the meaning of their visual representations. Therefore, we invite
scholars working on the history of humanitarian images, who are interested in
analysing their performative and material entanglements with emotions, to send
a 300-word proposal and a short biography by December, 14, 2018 to regardingthepainofothers@
Organising Committee
Valérie Gorin (CERAH, University of Geneva/Graduate Institute)
Marie Leyder (iEH2/Institute of Gender Studies, University of Geneva)
Dolores Martín-Moruno (iEH2, University of Geneva)
Gian Marco Vidor (iEH2, University of Geneva)
Scientific Committee
Roland Bleiker (University of Queensland, Australia)
Emma Hutchison (University of Queensland, Australia)
Jo Labanyi (New York University, USA)
Beatriz Pichel (De Montfort University, Leicester, UK)
Davide Rodogno (Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland)