Humanitarianism & the Media

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At St Antony’s College Oxford, the Richard von Weizsäcker fellow organizes a conference on humanitarianism and aid. The meeting takes place at the European Studies Centre, 70 Woodstock Road, on 19 -20 June 2015. It focuses on the media as an essential feature of the history of humanitarianism. Contributors discuss both the role of the media in humanitarian activities, and the imagery produced in print or on screen. Scholars from history, media studies, and anthropology present recent research with a view on the visual discourse, the meanings and materiality of the images since the beginning of the 20th century. Critically considering the medialisation of the humanitarian, they analyse the interaction between humanitarian agencies and media actors.

Speakers and topics:
(Detailed Programme Hum & Media 2015)

Johannes Paulmann (Oxford/ Mainz)
Introduction

I Humanitarian Imagery

Katharina Stornig (Mainz)
Promoting Distant Children in Need: Christian Imagery in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Rose Holmes (Sussex)
‘Make the situation real to us without stressing the horrors’: Children, photography and British humanitarianism in the Spanish Civil War

Daniel Palmieri (ICRC, Geneva)
Humanitarianism on the Screen: The ICRC Films from the 1920’s to the 1960’s

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CfP: Food Security and the Contemporary World

Call for papers for a special issue of Contemporanea. Rivista di storia dell’800 e del ’900

1127-3070

Food security is currently the focus of an international debate, which, in tackling the questions of malnutrition and starvation, also looks at global problems such as the North-South relationship, asymmetrical access to resources, and the world food system. Historians have contributed to this debate by generally identifying the years following the Second World War as the period in which contemporary policies took shape. This development may been seen by the United Nations’ decision to take up the question of food security and the creation of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), later accompanied by the World Food Programme (WFP 1961). From this perspective, the policies of the UN Agencies, intergovernmental agreements and negotiations between states have provided scholars with a key to interpreting the events of later decades within the context of the Cold War. Continue reading