The Art of Being Cared For - Gender, Race, and The Politics of Humanitarianism

Catalog description

This course will explore the nature and language of humanitarianism and its political and ethical effects. We will interrogate humanitarianism as a set of practices emerging from specific contexts and historical circumstances, rather than as a normative set of laws and rules. We will explore humanitarianism not as a triumphal project that transcends violence but as a mediated space that demands reckoning with the violence, uncertainties, and possibilities inherent in contemporary humanitarianism. We will examine cases throughout the world where humanitarianism simultaneously functions as a remedy for absent justice, a rationale for intervention, and an ally for state-sponsored violence.