Inéz Petrazzini, research assistant and a student in International Development at the University of Ottawa, talked about Recipro at the Shared Online Projects Initiative (SOPI) Showcase Event on April 29, 2021. The celebration was hosted by Dr. Aline Germain-Rutherford, Vice-Provost, Academic Affairs, University of Ottawa and Dr. David Hornsby, Associate Vice-President, Teaching and Learning, Carleton University. Developed by an inter-university partnership that includes the participation of students in courses in History and Sociology, the Recipro website project focuses on the history of international solidarity and centres on the convergence of pedagogy, science, and digital humanities.
Inéz Petrazzini is a third-year student completing an honours bachelor’s degree in International Development and Globalization (CO-OP) at the University of Ottawa. She worked as a Research and Teacher’s Assistant and Webmaster on the Recipro team. Her responsibilities included guiding students with their digital projects, building, developing, and updating the Omeka website, creating and contributing content for the Recipro project, as well as cataloguing, translating, and migrating content provided by the mentioned professors onto Omeka. Some of her interests include global politics, sustainable development projects, digital humanities, visual arts, and music.
The original video describing the Recipro Project can be found on the Recipro website and on their About Us page.
In 1975, Indonesian forces overran East Timor, just days after it had declared independence from Portugal. Canadian officials knew the invasion was coming and initially endorsed Indonesian rule. The ensuing occupation of the Southeast Asian country lasted twenty-four years.
Challenge the Strong Wind recounts the evolution of Canadian government policy toward East Timor from 1975 to its 1999 independence vote. During this time, Canadian civil society groups and NGOs worked in support of Timorese independence activists by promoting an alternative Canadian foreign policy that focused on self-determination and human rights. After following the lead of pro-Indonesian allies in the 1970s and ’80s, by the 1990s Ottawa had yielded to pressure from these NGOs and began to make its own decisions, eventually pushing like-minded countries to join it in supporting Timorese self-rule.
David Webster draws on previously untapped archival sources to articulate both government and non-government perceptions of the crisis. Human rights, competing nationalist claims, and peacemaking – key twentieth-century themes – intersect in East Timor, and the conflict provides a model of multilevel dialogue, citizen diplomacy, and novel approaches to resolving complex disputes. Ultimately, Webster criticizes the Canadian government for complicity in a near genocide, demonstrating that a clear-eyed view of international history must include non-state perspectives.
This sharply drawn work will be required reading for scholars studying Canadian history, foreign policy, international relations, human rights, Southeast Asia, and social activism.
In this interview with Dr. Samantha Cutrara, Dr. Glassford talks about a letter sent home from London in 1943 to demonstrate how prominent emotional labour and creating networks of home was for many women in the Red Cross. We talk about gender, and gendered expectations of care and service during the war, and how women’s experiences and expectations may have grated against these. This interview discusses the use of primary sources, women and WWII, and largely about emotions and caring through the lens of the Canadian Red Cross’ overseas humanitarian work.
Note: This conversation was recorded early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
More about Sarah: Sarah Glassford is a social historian and an archivist in the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor. She is the author of Mobilizing Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross, and co-editor of A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the First World War.
Held in mid-February 2021, this webinar was sponsored by the CNHH featuring five academics coming together from different aspects of Canadian foreign policy and aid relations: David Webster (Bishop’s University), Jill Campbell-Miller (Carleton University), Nassisse Solomon (Western University), April Ingham (Pacific People’s Partnership), Dru Oja Jay (co-author Paved with Good Intentions), and moderated by Bianca Mugyenyi (Canadian Foreign Policy Institute).
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This talk was delivered by Dr. Dominique Marshall on 15 October 2019 at the Ottawa Art Gallery, sponsored by the Ottawa Historical Association. This page is cross-posted with the Ottawa Historical Association website.
In 1924, the main employee of the Belgian based “Association internationale de protection de l’enfance”, moved to Geneva, as part of the agreement concluded by her employer with the League of Nations (LON). As one of the handful of members of the Social Question Section of the Secretariat of the LON, a position she occupied for 17 years, she travelled to international conferences, maintained an abundant correspondence, and supported the work of three successive directors of the Section. The papers she left in the archives of the LON reveal a network of Catholic charities, social workers and civil servants, as well as a group of French speaking reformers, who offered alternative notions of universal children rights, during debates otherwise dominated by Britain and the United States. The talk speaks of the many tensions behind the apparent simplicity of the first universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1924, such as the nature of childhood in colonial territories, the very definition of childhood, the roles of states, churches and professions, the desirability of institutions and of foster families, and the political role of children.
CNHH Sponsored Panel – Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, June 5, 2019, University of British Columbia
Education – defined broadly – was at the heart of notions, discourses, and practices of international development efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Learning from Development/Development from Learning:Aid and Education, 1945-1975 proposes to engage with this idea at multiple registers, across diverse time periods, and in the non-governmental, governmental, and intergovernmental settings. In so doing, it explores how Canadians were implicated in a diverse array of efforts to impart the knowledge of ‘development’, the way in which such knowledge was constructed, and the structures of power it thus reflected and reified. It also explores how Canadian involvement in the global development phenomenon led to a feedback of lessons that shaped how Canadians, their communities and their institutions related to the Global South.
To this end, Jill Campbell-Miller focuses on the life and career path of individual women in order to uncover the role Canadians and Canadian organizations played in developing medical institutions in India. Building on this discussion, David Meren explores the origins and evolution of a UN Regional Training Centre launched in the late 1950s at UBC, a collaboration between that university, the UN, and the Canadian government, and how efforts to train individuals from the Global South meant to carry home the knowledge obtained from their time in the Pacific Northwest were interwoven with settler colonialism. Finally, Kevin Brushett explores ‘Ten Days for World Development’, a program the Interchurch Consultative Committee for Development and Relief for development education launched in 1973 with a view to raising awareness of development and social justice issues among Canadian communities, and that evolved into a network for development education programs with which Canada and Canadian NGOs became strongly – though not uncomplicatedly – associated.
Thank you to CNHH member David Meren for organizing this year’s panel.
00.00: Introduction by Chair, David Webster, Associate Professor, Bishop’s University
04:00: Jill Campbell-Miller, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, Carleton University, “A Mission for Modernity: Canadians and Medical Education in India, 1946-1966”
27:00: David Meren, Professeur agrégé, Départment d’histoire, Université de Montréal, “The Pedagogy of ‘Development’: Settler Colonialism and the Origins, Life and Demise of the United Nations Regional Training Centre for Technical Assistance at UBC”
57:15: Kevin Brushett, Associate Professor, Department of History, Royal Military College of Canada, “On Ten Days to Shake the World: NGOs, the State, and the Politics of Development Education”
1:22:45: Question period
*Please note – some of the questions are difficult to hear in this section of the audio, and you may have to adjust your volume appropriately.
The Canadian Network on Humanitarian History sponsored a panel at the Canadian Historical Association in Regina on May 29th, 2018 on “Histories of Humanitarianism and (Visual) Media.” Four presentations explored the complicated ways in which media, particularly visual media, challenged, described, and elicited humanitarian interventions in the 20th century. On the whole, the panel asked the audience to think about the important role that media has played in histories of humanitarianism globally, and the complexities inherent in the use of media as a tool in humanitarian contexts.
Histories of Humanitarianism and (Visual) Media | Histoires de l’humanitaire et les médias (visuels)
Panel introduction by Chair, Stephanie Bangarth (Western University), 0:09
Sonya de Laat (McMaster University): “Visual Displacement of Refugees: Lewis Hine’s First World War Photographs for the American Red Cross, 1918-1919,” 3:08
Valérie Gorin (University of Geneva): “Humanitarian Cinema and Visual Advocacy in the 1920s: When Seeing was Believing,” 14:50
Soenke Kundel (Free University of Berlin/Germany): “Global Media and the New Humanitarianism in the Context of the Vietnam War,” 29:40
Dominique Marshall (Carleton University) “ ‘CIDA Brings you the World! ‘Children’s Reception of Humanitarian Photographs of Children: 1980-2000,” 40:35
Panel Chair Stephanie Bangarth poses prepared questions to the panel, 54:15
The panel is opened to questions from the audience, 1:16:40. Be advised that these questions may be difficult to hear given the audience’s position to the microphone. You may be required to increase the audio’s volume to hear this portion.
Sponsored by the Canadian Network on Humanitarian History | Parrainée par le Réseau canadien sur l’histoire de l’humanitaire
On 28 March 2017, McGill University’s historian of Latin America, Dr. Catherine LeGrand, met with students and faculty of Carleton University to discuss Catholic Missions, Liberation Theology, and Humanitarianism in participation with the Canadian Network on Humanitarian History. The audio of this workshop may be found here. Details of this event can be found on the CNHH website.
Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities 2016, University of Calgary
June 1st, 2016
Chair: Nicole Marion (Carleton University)
Nassisse Solomon (Western University): Combating the “Eclipse in Ethiopia”: Humanitarian Efforts of the Sudan Interior Mission During the Italo-Ethiopian War
Dominique Marshall (Carleton University): Humanitarisme et réseaux d’information transnationaux: flux de renseignements entre Oxfam UK, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam Québec et l’hémisphère sud, 1955-1975
Will Tait (Carleton University): Canadian Food Aid and the Transnational Evangelical Movement, 1970-1986
The audio is divided into five files and is organized by speaker. Nassisse Solomon’s paper is preceded by Nicole Marion’s introductory comments regarding the panelists, the purposes of the panel as a whole, and the kinds of work conducted by the Network. As the papers ran long, there is no question and answer phase following Will Tait’s presentation.