L’objectif de ce cours est de fournir aux étudiant.es et aux professionnel.les les bases du droit international humanitaire et la possibilité d’appliquer ces connaissances à travers des études de cas réalistes et une journée complète d’exercices de simulation.
Les candidatures d’étudiants universitaires, de fonctionnaires, d’organisations non gouvernementales, de journalistes et de toute personne désireuse d’en savoir plus sur le DIH sont les bienvenues. La préférence sera donnée aux participants ayant une expérience dans l’application ou la théorie du DIH, du droit international des droits de la personne ou du travail humanitaire. Les cours d’été seront dispensés par des universitaires et des experts canadiens et internationaux reconnus du ministère de la Défense nationale et du ministère de la Justice du Canada.
Veuillez noter que les formulaires d’inscription pour la 17e édition du cours d’été en DIH seront disponibles le 1er mars 2025. Si vous avez des questions, n’hésitez surtout pas à communiquer avec nous à l’adresse dih-ihl@uOttawa.ca.
The aim of this course is to provide students and professionals with the fundamentals of international humanitarian law and the opportunity to apply this knowledge through realistic case studies and a full day of simulation exercise.
Applications are welcome from university students, government employees, non-governmental organizations, journalists, and anyone interested in learning more about IHL. Preference will be given to participants with a background in the application or the theory of IHL, international human rights law or humanitarian work. The summer school will be taught by leading Canadian and international scholars and experts from the Department of National Defence and the Department of Justice Canada.
Please note that the registration forms for the 17th edition of the Summer School on IHL will be available on March 1st, 2025. If you have any questions about the summer school, please do not hesitate to contact us at dih-ihl@uOttawa.ca.
The CNHH is pleased to announce that a peer-reviewed article relating some of its members’ experiences engaging with communities and organizations around issues of humanitarian archives is now available to read in Issue 256 of the Revue internationale des études du développement.
“Creating Development Archives Ethically from an Over-Developed Country” appears in a special issue dealing with development archives around the world. The article is available online and open access at: https://journals.openedition.org/ried/23482.
Co-written by David Webster, Dominique Marshall, Chris Trainor, Sarah Glassford, and Eve Dutil, the article grew out of a thought-provoking roundtable sponsored by the CNHH at the 2023 conference of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA).
The roundtable, which was chaired by Glassford (Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections, University of Windsor), featured a lively discussion between Marshall (Department of History, Carleton University), Webster (Department of History & Global Studies, Bishop’s University), Trainor (MacOdrum Library Archives & Special Collections, Carleton University), Melanie Oppenheimer (Emeritus professor, Flinders University), and Fabrice Weissman (Centre de réflexion sur l’action et les savoirs humanitaires, Médecins sans frontières), on a wide array of issues facing scholars and practitioners who engage with archives of development and humanitarianism.
The discussion raised many points the participants were keen to explore further, and a subsequent call for papers from the Revue offered the opportunity to do so. Marshall, Glassford, Trainor, and Webster were joined by Dutil (formerly Bishop’s University, now a graduate student at Carleton University) in co-writing the paper, while Oppenheimer and Weissman graciously granted permission for their roundtable insights to be used as needed.
The result is an article that grapples with where the primary sources documenting humanitarian action end up archived, how, and by whom. It also highlights the direct work of the CNHH and its individual members in helping to preserve and make those primary sources available for future generations – work of which this network can be justly proud. Additionally, the composition of both the original roundtable and the resulting article’s team of co-authors offers yet another example of the CNHH’s commitment to bringing together scholars and practitioners, and the positive results that can come from those encounters.
As an affiliated committee of the CHA, the CNHH has an annual opportunity to sponsor a traditional panel of research papers or a roundtable like the 2023 one, as part of the CHA conference. If you have a theme or idea in the area of humanitarian or development history, around which you would like to organize a panel or roundtable, consider reaching out to the CNHH at aidhistory.canada@gmail.com, or by individually contacting one of the Steering Committee members (*whose contact information is available in the Members section of the CNHH website). It’s a great chance to link your individual research to a broader conversation, and to tap into the network the CNHH has built.
Dr. Sarah Glassford is an archivist at the Leddy Library Archives & Special Collections, with responsibility for community collections. She is also a social historian of modern Canada, the author of Mobilizing Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), and a founding member of the CNHH.
À propos de la bourse Cadieux-Léger – date limite de candidature : 13 janvier 2025
– Objectif : La bourse soutient les étudiants de doctorat qui mènent des recherches sur des sujets pertinents pour Affaires mondiales Canada.
– Rôle : Les boursiers travaillent en tant qu’analystes intégrés au Pôle ouvert d’analyse, contribuant à la recherche, aux notes d’orientation et aux efforts d’engagement.
– Durée de la bourse : La bourse s’étend sur une période maximale de douze mois, avec un engagement maximum de 25 heures par semaine.
– Bourse : Les candidats retenus reçoivent une bourse, plafonnée à 48 000 dollars en fonction de la durée de leur poste.
De plus amples informations sont disponibles sur l’offre d’emploi.
The French Association for Canadian Studies (AFEC) has issued a call for papers for its 48th Annual Conference, which will take place at Université Grenoble Alpes from June 18-20, 2025.
This event is aimed at all doctoral students, post-docs and other young researchers at the start of their careers (master’s students, temporary lecturers (ATERs), young PhDs without a contract) working on the Canadian cultural area – be it Anglophone Canada, Francophone Canada, Quebec, Indigenous People – or on themes related to Canada.
To echo the 2024-2025 edition of the Seasons of Canada (Saisons du Canada) organized by the Grenoble Centre for Canadian Studies, the general theme chosen for this next congress will be “Transition(s)”.
Under this broad and flexible theme, AFEC welcomes both theoretical and empirical contributions, from all disciplines – civilization, history, linguistics, literature, geography, law, sociology, political science, anthropology, arts, philosophy – reflecting the diversity of research carried out by up-and-coming researchers in Canadian Studies. Contributions may explore contemporary or historical issues related to Canada, including but not limited to:
Environmental or climate issues (ecological transition, energy, health), including ecological and ecofeminist perspectives;
Social reforms and political struggles in Canada, particularly those relating to the rights and representation of minority groups (indigenous people, 2SLGBTQ+, etc.);
Migration and (cross-)border issues;
The development and socio-economic impacts of new technologies (artificial intelligence, cybersecurity);
Current issues in indigenous studies, with a particular focus on movements of cultural and political resurgence and reappropriation;
The circulation of decolonial, postcolonial and/or feminist theories and practices in Canadian research (through the notions of positionality, situated knowledge, intersectionality, care, etc.);
The evolution of literary and artistic forms;
Linguistic issues (e.g. the revitalization / reclamation of Indigenous languages, the evolution of Canadian and Quebec language policies, debates surrounding certain linguistic practices, issues of linguistic representation in the media, etc.)
They should include a title, a 300-word abstract in English or French, 4 to 5 bibliographical references (not included in the total word count), and a short bio-bibliographical note (name, current status, institutional affiliation, fields of research and recent publications if applicable).
Following the review by the scientific committee, a response will be sent by January 15 at the latest to those who submitted a proposal.
Global Affairs Canada – Open Insights Hub – POR Ottawa (Ontario) From September 2024 to August 2025 The Cadieux-Léger Fellowship will last up to 12 months. The Fellow will receive a total bursary not greater than $48,000 contingent on duration.
Closing date: 25 June 2024 – 23:59, Pacific TimeWho can apply: Persons residing in Canada, and Canadian citizens and Permanent residents abroad.
From GC Jobs:
The Open Insights Hub of Global Affairs Canada (GAC) is pleased to announce the selection process for the 2024-2025 Cadieux-Léger Fellowship.
The Cadieux-Léger Fellow is integrated within the Open Insights Hub at GAC as an analyst. The Hub engages with external experts and fosters relationships with the knowledge institutions as part of its research and analysis on foreign, economic and international assistance policy issues, as well as environmental scanning to identify emerging global trends and changes. The Cadieux-Léger Fellow’s activities will focus on themes of relevance to Canadian international interests.
While at GAC, the Fellow is expected to advance the Hub’s current thematic agenda, including understanding the evolving structure of international relations and its implications for Canada. Priority areas of focus include: Canada’s vulnerabilities and opportunities in the context of geopolitical risk; navigating great power competition; engaging the middle ground (or Global South); examining Canada’s international toolkit of policies and programs; the Canada-United States bilateral relationship and impact on Canada’s broader foreign policy; economic security and resilience; and the international dimensions of horizontal issues as emerging technologies, or climate change and the green transition.
We welcome proposals related to these themes and others that have clear relevance to Canadian foreign policy priorities, notably international advocacy and diplomacy. The relevance and quality of the research proposal is an important factor in the selection process, as are interpersonal skills and capacity for engagement and teamwork.
The Open Insights Hub aims to create an engaged, strategic, rigorous, collaborative and innovative environment through knowledge-sharing and interaction with internal and external experts, assumption testing, exchanging experience and facilitating innovative ideas, as well as soliciting and welcoming input in new ways from a variety of stakeholders. Accordingly, the Fellow would be expected to build networks within GAC, the Government of Canada and with external experts. A particular emphasis will be placed on identifying and engaging new sets of stakeholders whose good ideas can be leveraged.
Candidates are expected to work in presence at Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa.
Positions to be filled: 1 or 2, funding for a second Fellow to be confirmed
Positions to be filled: 1
For further information including eligibility and application requirements, please visit the GC Jobs posting for the 2024-2025 Cadieux-Léger Fellowship.
Global Affairs Canada (GAC), in collaboration with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), is pleased to announce the seventh edition of the International Policy Ideas Challenge. The objective of the program is to draw on the network of talented Canadian graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and early-career civil society researchers to identify concrete, innovative solutions to emerging international policy challenges faced by Canada.
The program offers applicants a chance to test their skills at translating academic expertise into policy language and insights. Applicants are invited to submit brief proposals. GAC will select between 5 and 10 winning proposals and provide coaching to researchers as part of further developing their proposals into full policy briefs. Winners will present their briefs to Government of Canada officials as part of the virtual Ideas Symposium, taking place in late 2024.
Call for proposals launch: June 14, 2024
Application deadline: July 15, 2024
Assessment of applications: July – August 2024
Selection of the 5 to 10 winning entries: August 2024
GAC and SSHRC announce winners: August 2024
Four coaching sessions (roughly 3 days in total; see “Coaching,” above): August-October 2024
Policy briefs due: Exact date TBD
Virtual Ideas Symposium to present final research products to Government of Canada officials at GAC: November or December 2024
Description: Humanitarian agencies have long tackled questions of food (in)security. In doing so, they have largely contributed to contemporary conceptions of the causes and remedies of famines, to the making of a vocabulary around food security, and to the construction and the dissemination of the main representations of famine. This panel explores practices of famine relief at the village/micro level on three continents, by international and local agents. Furthermore, it discusses the convergence and divergence of ideas between humanitarian workers, about governance of food production and delivery, about healthcare and debility, and about climate and nature. The panel will compare how they leveraged these assumptions to accomplish their missions in four different micro-contexts.
Panelists:
David Webster, Historian, Bishop’s University and Rogerio Savio Ma’averu, independent researcher, Timor-Leste, Famine, Aid and Strategies For Resilience In Timor-Leste Villages, 1975-79
Nassisse Solomon, Western University, “Village-to-Village”: Micro-initiatives with large-scale impact in Canadian Engagements with The Ethiopian Famine of 1984-88.
Sonya de Laat, Research Associate, McMaster University, Dearth and Detail: Re-viewing Historical Images for Great Understanding of Causes and Responses to Food Security Crises
Machia Désiré, Enseignant permanent d’histoire-géographie-Education à la Citoyenneté et à la Morale, CES DE NKASSOMO /MINESEC, La diplomatie humanitaire suisse en Afrique centrale : dimensions locales, rétrospective et prospective
The Annual meeting of the CNHH will take place 18 June 2024 from 12:00-1:30pm. Join in person or online. In-person location: ARMST 255.
Maximilian Klose has a new monograph on the history of the organization CARE and its work in postwar Germany. Here is the link to the website: https://biblioscout.net/book/10.25162/9783515136563. It is an open access publication, so anyone can download it for free.
Why They Gave (cover) by Maximillian Klose
Synopsis:
Maximilian Kloses’ first book, Why They Gave: CARE and American Aid for Germany after 1945,appeared in the Transatlantic Historical Studies series of the German publishing house Franz Steiner in June 2024. Focusing on the US organization CARE, the study investigates why Americans were more likely to give humanitarian aid to their recently defeated enemies than to their allies or to the victims of Nazi aggression. Embedding a diverse selection of case studies in the social, cultural, and political debates of the early postwar era, the study finds that these acts of giving were much more than altruistic deeds. In fact, donors used humanitarianism for their own purposes. Some gave to people who reflected their own worldview and sense of importance, or who could strategically advance their power on either side of the Atlantic. Others supported causes they considered essential to the progress of German-American relations in the early Cold War. In all cases, humanitarianism was at least as much about the donor as it was about the recipient.
The article “Molding Heritage Through Humanitarian Aid: German-Americans, Nazism, and Debates on Postwar German Suffering and Guilt” (Journal of Contemporary History, May 2024) investigates how US-Americans of German ancestry used humanitarian aid to Germany after World War II to deliberate their individual notions of heritage amidst the recent violent past of the land of origin. It looks at the rhetoric used by the leaders of German-American heritage organizations and both ethnic and non-ethnic humanitarian agencies. The article finds that these groups employed debates on German postwar suffering and the idea of the Germans being Hitler’s ‘first victims’ to circumvent any accusation of potential German public complicity. They did so not because their German origin subjected immigrants to much public hostility in the United States the way it had during the First World War, but rather because the Nazi atrocities threatened to taint their understandings of Germanness and heritage. By portraying fascism as an outside force that was not inherently German but that had preyed on Germanness from the outside, immigrants could resort to humanitarian aid as a means of rehabilitation that did not support the perpetrators but the victims of World War II.
CNHH members Sonya de Laat, Nassisse Solomon and Dominique Marshall have been awarded the CHA Collaboration Fund for 2024-2025 with colleagues Arsenii Alenichev, postdoctoral fellow at ITB Belgium, and Valérie Gorin from the Geneva Centre for Humanitarian Studies. Their project is to mount an exhibition aimed at engaging a wider public with important information on the historical sources generative AI tools learn from. Building on previous scholarship on histories of aid iconography (de Laat & Gorin) and their experience with exhibition curation, and scholarship on histories of international humanitarian aid (de Laat, Gorin, Solomon, Marshall), the exhibition includes exploration of the promise and pitfalls of generative AI and global health images that Alenichev has recently reported on. Virtual and physical exhibits will be displayed at collaborating institutions through early 2025.
From member Jonathon Zimmer, a PhD student in the Department of History at Queen’s University:
I am currently working to complete my field requirements, which will allow me to major in Canadian twentieth century history and minor in North American (Canada/U.S.) humanitarian history. As part of the program at Queen’s, the assessment for my minor field was to design a new course syllabus based on my many readings. I defended this syllabus last month, and I was hoping to perhaps share the news of my minor field topic. I have attached my mock syllabus which is the very first I have ever designed and perhaps one of the few that are dedicated specifically to humanitarian history! The mock course description is as follows:
“History 000/000 examines the relatively understudied history of humanitarianism in both the United States and Canada in the twentieth century. Topics for discussion include the relationship between philanthropy and nongovernment organizations (NGOs), the emergence of humanitarianism as a theory, the impact of humanitarianism and North American national aid agencies, the historical objectives associated with aid policy, distinctions between Canadian and American approaches to aid, how individuals can affect the aid-giving process, and how historical structures (primarily set in the Cold War) can help to inform our own understanding of giving aid today.”
From John W. Foster, Justice Studies, University of Regina:
One of the remarkable publications of the past year is Canada-Chile Solidarity: Testimonies of Civil Society Action, edited by Liisa L. North (Toronto, Novalis, 2023) 280 pp. Based on the extensive collection of church, labour, solidarity and personal documents compiled by the Latin America Working Group (LAWG) and located at York University. “Its pages offer gripping testimonies of the individuals and organizations that led solidarity” Details of the sustained advocacy which led to significant changes in Canadian refugee policy and the break down of resistance to refugees from the bloody 1973 coup d’etat against the government of President Salvador Allende. Included are voices from some of the refugees who came to settle in Canada and contribute to Canadian society.
Dominique Marshall is preparing an online MA seminar for the Fall of 2024 on the history of Disability, Capability and Debility in the history of Canada, which will include modules on humanitarian relief, war, maiming, humanitarian aid, and design. Graduate students of all disciplines are welcome.
Dominican Brother and missionary in Rwanda, Yvon Pomerleau, presented a collection of French African Graphic Novels to Carleton University’s Archives and Special Collections. Photo credit: Dominique Marshall
We have invited Pomerleau to join the annual meeting of the CNHH in Montreal.
IV. COMMON INITIATIVES FROM MEMBERS
Sarah Glassford, Dominique Marshall, Chris Trainor and David Webster wrote an article together entitled “Creating Development Archives ethically from an over-developed country: Promises and dilemmas of the Canadian Network of Humanitarian History (2013-2024), with the assistance of Eve Dutil. It was submitted this Spring 2024 to the Revue internationale des études du développement. The basis of this reflection was the roundtable the CNHH hosted in 2023 at Congress on archives of development.
V. BLOGS & TALKS PUBLISHED BY THE CNHH SINCE THE LAST BULLETIN (November 2023)
Contribute! If readers of the CNHH Bulletin would like to contribute to the “Essential Reads” series, or on any other subject relevant to our membership, please contact Sarah Glassford: Sarah.Glassford@uwindsor.ca . We would be thrilled to feature your reading recommendations, or your thoughts and experiences on other CNHH topics!
Dear colleagues of the CNHH, this will interest many of you.
All the best,
Dominique
Dr. Susan Armstrong-Reid wrote the CNHH in their capacity as Chair of the AAHN Research Grants Committee to ensure that the Network is updated on recent changes to AAHN research grants available to scholars of nursing, healthcare and humanitarianism at all stages of their careers. As a scholar researching the ethics of humanitarian nursing, Dr. Armstrong-Reid is particularly interested in forging transnational links to provide a more sophisticated and critical understanding of the development of the humanitarian system and continuing transformation required to meet even basic human security. The challenges only continue to grow, taxing the humanitarian system well beyond its current capacity to respond.
There are now three awards: H-15 Grant (an early career research grant for scholars who hold a research doctorate granted within the last 8 years); H-21Grant (for mid-to-senior scholars with a publication record); and the H-31 Pre-Doctoral Research Grant.
Please note: the deadline for submissions has been changed to May 1, 2024, and successful candidates will now be notified on July 1, 2024. The committee hopes that this later due date works better within the academic year for both faculty and students.
Moreover, the guidelines for the pre-doctoral research grant were extensively revised to provide a clearer picture of what the committee expected to be included and the consequent steps students should take prior to submitting their proposals. It was the committee’s belief that the new guidelines might be beneficial for students applying for larger research grants. A more detailed description of the eligibility criteria for all three grants and the guidelines for submitting a proposal in 2024 are available at: https://www.aahn.org/research-grants.
As one of its goals for 2023-24, the committee determined to reach out to our international colleagues to encourage them and their students to consider applying for these grants. We believe it is important to bring fresh transnational perspective and innovative methodologies that span disciplines to foster a more sophisticated critical understanding of how nursing’s past shaped its future direction in healthcare. The committee welcomes proposals that span historical time periods and a diverse range of topics.
In addition, AAHN also provides opportunities to publish articles based upon larger research projects in Nursing History Review or present papers at its 2024 Convention to be held September 19-21, 2024, in Milwaukee.
All the best for 2023-24 academic year and in in your own important and very salient research endeavours.
Top 5 Reads on the Historical Role of Media in the Ethiopian Famine Crisis of 1984
~ As recommended by Jonathon Zimmer, January 2024 ~
When I first began working on my MA thesis at the University of Regina, it didn’t take long to realize the intricate connection between humanitarian aid mobilization and the portrayal of crises by the media. My MA research focused on the portrayal of the Ethiopian famine of 1984, one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century, by television, newspaper, and magazine outlets in Canada. Fueled by news reports of a disaster impacting millions in Africa, Canadians ‘stepped up’ by collectively donating millions of dollars to the relief effort. Not only did such support surprise the media, but also the Canadian government, which quickly worked to facilitate the cooperation of both the public and private sectors.
I was fortunate to have at my disposal several scholars whose work covered the broad and remarkably complex history of the famine. Indeed, some scholars like Suzanne Franks, Eleanor Singer, and Phyllis M. Endreny directly address the role of the media in reporting on humanitarian crises, with specific reference to the Ethiopian famine. Others, like Fen Hampson and Nassisse Solomon, note the effect of the media on government decisions relating to aid. With such a broad range of topics at one’s disposal, here are the sources that I would recommend, among others, for those interested in the portrayal of humanitarian crises by the media, using the Ethiopian famine as an example:
Suzanne Franks. Reporting Disasters: Famine, Aid, Politics and the Media. London: Hurst & Company, 2013.
Suzanne Franks’ Reporting Disasters is one of most important sources for examining the role of the media in exposing the scale of the Ethiopian famine and is an essential read for those interested in the intricate tie between the media and humanitarianism. As she delves into the role of the BBC and the challenges their reporters met in exposing the famine to the wider Western public, she identifies how little aid had been entering the country prior to the media devoting significant attention to the crisis. Without the BBC and other subsequent media entering Ethiopia, the famine would not have attracted the international attention that it did. However, as she delves into the processes and behind-the-scenes workings of the BBC, she discovers that there is more at play than the benevolent intentions of individuals and instead the corporate workings of the media room may work against the humanitarian agenda of famine relief.
Eleanor Singer and Phyllis M. Endreny. Reporting on Risk: How the Mass Media Portray Accidents, Diseases, Disasters, and Other Hazards. New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1993.
Eleanor Singer and Phyllis M. Endreny do well in their demonstration of the competition between domestic and international stories for an audience–or, put another way, the value of a news story. Singer and Endreny note several important points about how the media portrayed the Ethiopian famine in the United States. For example, Singer and Endreny attribute the use of blame by the media to being one of the key factors in derailing American aid efforts. Specifically, American media sought to blame part of the origins of the crisis on Western governments, which they contend have been ignoring Ethiopia’s call for help.
Susan D. Moeller. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. New York: Routledge, 1999.
A topic that can be reflected in numerous humanitarian crises, Compassion Fatigue echoes similar points to Reporting on Risk by examining the selection of news stories and their implications on the attitudes of the American public. Her selection focuses on disasters from the 1980s and 90s, particularly on famines, wars, diseases, and other causes of death. Of note, the third chapter of her book has a significant portion devoted to the famine in Ethiopia. She provides a wonderful overview of the situation on the ground and then delves into the role of the American media in exposing the scale of the famine. Further, she does well in noting the impact of celebrity aid, the role of print media, and what various reporters focused on throughout the period of attention the famine received.
Fen Osler Hampson. Master of Persuasion: Brian Mulroney’s Global Legacy. New York: Signal, 2018.
Many historians examining the famine and Canada’s humanitarian response have used it as a milestone for Brian Mulroney’s federal Progressive Conservative government. Fen Hampson’s Master of Persuasion features an excellent overview of what he dubs “the CBC Factor,” or how the CBC’s November 1st, 1984, broadcast elicited such a strong response from the Canadian public. The Canadian media kept federal aid efforts in check by bringing up various issues and shortcomings on the part of the government. Such reporting elicited a response from within Parliament, which would debate and discuss matters of aid in the House of Commons. Overall, Hampson’s work demonstrates the evolving link between the public and private sectors with regards to famine relief, galvanized by the CBC and other Canadian media.
Nassisse Solomon. “Tears are Not Enough: Canadian Political and Social Mobilization for Famine Relief in Ethiopia, 1984-88,” in The Samaritan State Revisited. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2019.
The Samaritan State is a fantastic collection of works pertaining to Canada’s aid history. The contribution by Nassisse Solomon, a fellow CNHH member, in part explores how the famine’s publicity, generated by various media outlets, drove the close cooperation between the government and the public. She, like other scholars on this list, asserts the importance of the media in enabling various members of the Canadian government to undertake an aid mission to Ethiopia. Further, her work represents one of the rare instances in which she was able to interview a key member of the response team, its federal organizer, David MacDonald.
Jonathon Zimmer is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Queen’s University, Kingston. His doctoral work, under the direction of Dr. Lisa Pasolli, examines the actions of the Canadian government in response to famine in Ethiopia. This research builds upon his University of Regina MA thesis that explored Canadian media reactions to the Ethiopian Famine of 1984, and how this influenced federal approaches to the crisis. He is the author of “Mobilizing the World: Brian Mulroney and Canada’s Humanitarian Response to Famine in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Canada and the Challenges of Leadership: How Canadian Prime Ministers have Responded to Crises at Home and Abroad (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2023).
With a goal of having at least two bulletins a year, this is the second bulletin of 2023. Please continue sending updates as we prepare for the next bulletin for May 2024.
CONTENT
CNHH at Congress 2024, York University or virtual
Round table on Local histories of famine relief – still time to join the panel
Annual general meeting – Save the approximate date
News from members
Archives news
Common initiatives from members
Blogs & talks published by the CNHH
Welcome to new members
I. CONGRESS 2024 McGILL UNIVERSITY
CNHH ROUNDTABLE, ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING & OTHER NEWS
Roundtable: “Local histories of famine relief: food, (in)security, justice and nature at the village/micro level”
Format: Roundtable, hybrid format (online + in-person).
Venue: McGill University, Montreal
Date & Time: TBD June 2024
Chair: Dominique Marshall
Description: Humanitarian agencies have long tackled questions of food (in)security. In doing so, they have largely contributed to contemporary conceptions of the causes and remedies of famines, to the making of a vocabulary around food security, and to the construction and the dissemination of the main representations of famine. This panel explores practices of famine relief at the village/micro level on three continents, by international and local agents. Furthermore, it discusses the convergence and divergence of ideas between humanitarian workers, about governance of food production and delivery, about healthcare and debility, and about climate and nature. The panel will compare how they leveraged these assumptions to accomplish their missions in four different micro-contexts.
Panelists:
David Webster, Historian, Bishop’s University and Rogerio Savio Ma’averu, independent researcher, Timor-Leste, Famine, Aid and Strategies for Resilience in Timor-Leste Villages, 1975-79.
Nassisse Solomon, Western University, “Village-to-Village”: Micro-initiatives with large-scale impact in Canadian Engagements with the Ethiopian Famine of 1984-88.
Sonya de Laat, Research Associate, McMaster University, Dearth and Detail: Reviewing Historical Images for Greater Understanding of Causes and Responses to Food Security Crises.
Machia Désiré, Enseignant permanent d’histoire-géographie-Education à la Citoyenneté et à la Morale, CES DE NKASSOMO /MINESEC, La diplomatie humanitaire suisse en Afrique centrale : dimensions locales, rétrospective et prospective.
Interested in being a panelist? There is still an opportunity to join this panel. Please contact Dominique Marshall, DominiqueMarshall@CUNET.CARLETON.CA, by December 15 so that the panel can begin communicating about the round table in the New Year.
The Annual meeting of the CNHH will take place during Congress which runs 12-21 June 2024. Details of when and where the meeting will take place, registration link, and an agenda will be shared closer to the date. It will be hybrid.
Dominique Marshall published “Teaching Human Rights History,” American Review of Canadian Studies, 53:1 (2023),118-130. She presented “The League of Red Cross Societies & Disabled People: Transnational insights on war impairment, capacity & debility”, Geneva, June 2023, Symposium on “The League of Red Cross Societies: Historical Perspectives 1919-1991”. The science portal of Gendered Design in STEAM, an initiative of the International Development Research Centre, which she co-directed, is now open: https://carleton.ca/gendesignsteam/ .
CNHH members Sonya de Laat and Nassisse Solomon have been collaborating with Arsenii Alenichev, as postdoctoral fellow at Oxford, on a project exploring historical legacies shaping contemporary visual representations of global health issues and activities. Alenichev recently published preliminary results of an exercise that aimed to explore the promise of generative AI to produce more ethical depictions than those that have been the subject of critique for the better part of the past several decades. Coinciding with the publication of an NPR piece about the project, de Laat (SdL) asked Alenichev (AA) about this experiment:
[SdL] What inspired the project?
[AA] Since I started writing a PhD about precarious [clinical] trial subjects, Facebook started showing me the images of, like advertisements of young clinical trial [subjects], and they were smiling people and that was kind of very, very different from local realities, at least what I encountered in [west African country]… I interviewed trial subjects and many of them they were well really disturbed people because many of them there were ex-combatants, many of them just marginalized youth who participated in the trial for the money…That kind of prompted me to start asking questions about who created those images, how they’re created, why they are shown on Google in that way.
[The AI exercise] was a spontaneous kind of thing because my co-author really wanted to invert typical global health images. As I was trying to invert those images, I realized that it’s not really possible. I initially overlooked it and I remember I messaged [my co-author] just to say, “hey, we cannot do this exercise because it always tends to revert back to the suffering subject, the white saviour tropes.” [My co-author] was like, “Oh my God this is horrifying,” and then I was like, “oh, wait a second, yeah this is indeed horrifying because it actually tells quite a lot about the visual culture of global health and the kind of the relationship between artificial intelligence and chronic socioeconomic issues and the stereotypes and in ways in which they traveled.” And then I sent it to some friends and colleagues, some of them from the global south, and they were like, “it’s really horrifying.” It was quite striking that even if you ask AI specifically to produce images of black African doctors taking care of white kids, white suffering kids, it would always show you black kids as a recipient of care, and it would occasionally show you white doctors as providers of care. This really showcases the biases that whiteness is hegemonically coupled with the provision of care and blackness with reception of care.
[SdL] What is the main takeaway about generative AI in this instance?
[AA] The whole harmful stereotypes that global health practitioners activists and scholars have been fighting against it just is being casually reproduced. The whole exercise makes me feel very uncomfortable because these images are problematic; I mean, those images were co-created, I participated in the creation of those images. I’m still deeply disturbed by the whole thing. But again those images they’re replicated from the matrix of quote-end-quote ‘real images’ and I think this is where the complexity lies primarily…
One thing that is crystal clear, that there is this biased one way another and we should actively resist the political, the contextualising notion that AI products are somehow neutral and value free. No, they’re the mirror of reality. We could employ people with global health heritage to kind of improve AI, to make sure that the data sets are more inclusive, but that, ultimately, is not going to fix the chronic systematic inequalities that are in the very fabric of our societies. So that’s one of the key takeaway messages. Yes, there should be more involvement of people from diverse backgrounds, but also, it’s a sign that our society is not OK.
Ultimately, this is a cautionary tale (again) about new technologies—this time it is photo-realistic generative AI and its inherent flaw of reflecting back biases and reinforcing societal prejudices rather than challenging or overcoming them. Even when actively trying to create counter-narratives, photo-realistic generative AI struggles and fails due to the existing historical record of images available on the Internet—which are predominantly reproductions of harmful stereotypes—that form the foundation of the software’s algorithms.
Possible means of remedying (or ameliorating) this situation include, as Alenichev suggested, involving or following the lead of people from diverse backgrounds in the creation of images. For historians, an option is to flood the net with a diversity of underrepresented or overlooked stories and with alternative representations to add more material for AI to draw from. Examples can be seen in the “Treasures of CIDA Photography Collections” or Chapters 9 of the Samaritan State Revisited.
Watch this space as Solomon, de Laat, and Alenichev build on the generative AI project with a parallel look at the historical record forming the visual foundations of images that generative AI draws from, and with continued discussions of promises and pitfalls of this technology.
The new website of the Carleton University disability Research Group was launched in late October: https://carleton.ca/disability-research-group/ It includes exhibits sponsored by the CNHH:
Transnational Representation: Canada and the Founding of Disabled People’s International, 1981 (https://transnationalrepresentation.omeka.net/exhibits/show/transnational-representation–/transnational-representation)
Refugees, Disability and Technology in Transnational Postwar Canada, 1946-1953 (https://envisioningtechnologies.omeka.net/exhibits/show/refugees–disability-and-techn/an-unending-global-crisis)
The 2013 edition of the CNHH Roundtable at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association at York University on “Ahistorical Aid: The Hidden Costs of Historical Amnesia in NGOs” was a great success. Thanks to convenor and chair Sarah Glassford, who is working at making its results public, to participants and CNHH mmbers, David Webster, Chris Trainor, and special guest Fabrice Weissman of the CRASH-msf project.
The CNHH helped arrange the visiting fellowship of Ghanaian specialists of coastal fisheries Joseph Aggrey-Fynn (https://directory.ucc.edu.gh/p/joseph-aggrey-fynn) at Carleton University at the end of the Fall term 2023. Dr Fynn is involved in several transnational development project. The CNHH will post news of the activities surrounding his visits as soon as they are scheduled.
Symbol stamps inside the cover of the books of the NNATC over the years: The college received book donations from many associations. Some of the content of this library travelled with the founder, Benedict: “For years he drove across the northeastern part of this continent with his library of books and personal knowledge”. [3] “He used a van and a pile of books in his many years journey, driving across the east, alone for much of the time, carrying a dream and the knowledge obtained from Iroquois nationalists.” [4] (Photos taken by: Richard Marchese)
Contribute! If readers of the CNHH Bulletin would like to contribute to the “Essential Reads” series, or on any other subject relevant to our membership, please contact Sarah Glassford: Sarah.Glassford@uwindsor.ca . We would be thrilled to feature your reading recommendations, or your thoughts and experiences on other CNHH topics!
VI. WELCOME TO NEW MEMBERS
Anna Kozlova (2020-present) is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She holds a BA in Communication Studies with a Minor in Law from Carleton University and an MA in World Heritage Studies from the Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus, Germany. Her research interests are focused on migration, diaspora, oral history, and transnationalism. She was the lead researcher on a MITACS-funded project “Two case studies in the public history of international development policies in Canada: the Lebanese Special Measures Program (1975-1990) and The Life of Lewis Perinbam (1925-2008),” which you can read about here.
~ as recommended by Jill Campbell-Miller, October 2023 ~
When I started looking into the history of Canadian foreign aid some fifteen years ago or so, not much scholarship existed about the history of development and foreign aid. As a student of Canadian foreign assistance, I was fortunate to have David Morrison’s Aid and Ebb Tide: A History of CIDA and Canadian Development Assistance. From a global perspective, the book most often referenced at the time was the late Gilbert Rist’s History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. Though the book is undoubtedly a valuable piece of scholarship, the late Dr. Rist was not a historian, and the book was too broad and too thinly sourced to be comparable to the type of historical scholarship I sought.
Since that time, the landscape has changed dramatically. While I struggled to put together five works of professional history on this subject in the late oughts, today, I struggle to narrow down the choices to just five. I might have felt alone starting my PhD, but little did I know there were many scholars with similar interests working on major projects. While it came late for my historiography chapter, maybe it is not too late for someone else’s PhD dissertation. Here are five to get you started:
Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Manela. The Development Century: A Global History. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Fifteen years ago, I would have been amazed and delighted to find an edited collection of historical essays all covering histories of development. This collection is divided into four thematic groups that examine the origins of development, development in a decolonizing world, Cold War politics, and development and international society. It has a nice balance of geographies, topics, and temporal scopes, and is a good introduction to many of the key areas of study for historians of development. I have a particular soft spot for histories of development that locate the very early origins of the development project, and co-editor Manela’s chapter on “Smallpox and the Globalization of Development” is a great example of this.
Matthew Connelly. Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. Harvard University Press, 2010.
While perhaps not a “history of development” proper, this book is an absolute must for understanding the development movement of the twentieth century. So many of the aid programs that developed in the 1950s and 1960s were based around the idea of controlling the world’s population, and so many of the prominent figures within important global institutions believed in a gospel of population control. Understanding this history is a crucial part of understanding the whole landscape of development in the mid-to-late twentieth century, and Connelly is not only a good historian, he is also an excellent story-teller.
Sarah Lorenzini. Global Development: A Cold War History. Princeton University Press, 2019.
Odd Arne Westad refreshed the field of Cold War history by forcing his readers to see the rest of the world within a history that had been so often framed by American-Soviet politics in The Global Cold War (2005). Helpful as it was, as a reader in the 2000s, I also hoped for a book that would flesh out the way that development programming played into Cold War politics. Lorenzini’s book has finally brought these two fields together into one comprehensive volume. Arguing that development was “molded by the Cold War and, in turn, actively designed some of its structures” (4), Lorenzini’s book covers a huge terrain – from the colonial precedents of the interwar years to the major projects of American and Soviet aid, to those trying to challenge the bipolar constraints of the Cold War through development.
Corinna R. Unger. International Development: A Postwar History. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Unger’s book is the type of textbook I craved as a student. It covers the vocabulary and terminology central to development history, the important philosophical and colonial precedents to the post-war development movement, the major programs of the twentieth century, and the critiques and challenges the development movement faced in the late twentieth century and beyond. Unger’s book is a solid first place to start for anyone interested in this field, and despite the breadth of its subject matter, it is quite concise.
Kevin O’Sullivan. The NGO Moment: The Globalisation of Compassion from Biafra to Live Aid. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
I will finish with a book from one of the CNHH’s very own, Kevin O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan’s book is a much-needed bird’s-eye view on one of the most important driving forces of development in the latter years of the twentieth century – development and humanitarian non-governmental organizations. Past books on developmental NGOs have typically had an agenda – either as hagiographies or as take-downs – but O’Sullivan’s book is a critical yet nuanced look at the history of these important organizations within the geopolitical context of the larger development movement. Focusing on three states, Britain, Canada, and Ireland, O’Sullivan examines the “‘progressive, interventionist model of compassion that privileged aid over political solidarity with the Third World.” By taking a transnational perspective, O’Sullivan is able to emphasize the global linkages between many different NGOs, and the ideologies that linked them together. Also, there are just a lot of fascinating stories in this book.
Dr. Jill Campbell-Miller is a historian who specializes in twentieth-century Canadian political and social history. Her interests particularly focus on Canadian foreign assistance and humanitarianism in South Asia during the mid-twentieth century. Her dissertation, which she is currently revising to become a manuscript, examines the history of Canadian foreign aid in India during the 1950s. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Gorsebrook Research Institute at Saint Mary’s University, and in the Department of History at Carleton University, and presently works as a civil servant with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. She is co-editor, with Greg Donaghy and Stacey Barker, of Breaking Barriers, Shaping Worlds: Canadian Women and the Search for Global Order (UBC Press, 2021).
