This past week, the journal Past & Present from Oxford University Press published a roundtable discussion on the relatively recent and rapid rise in the study of humanitarian history. The following reflects the original introduction to the discussion as published in the journal. Links to the complete article are provided below. Continue reading
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For any who missed the Network’s most recent bulletin, it can be read in its’ entirety below. Continue reading
by Deniz Yonucu
reposted from H-Announce. The byline reflects the original authorship.
Human Rights Work and Transnational Legal Activism: Limits and Potential
February 8 and 9, 2019
International human rights laws and bodies have been one of the key sites of the struggle against state crimes and human rights abuses in the post-World War II era. Yet, the discrepancy between the promises of international human rights laws and what they actually do has not gone unquestioned. While in some contexts numerous international treaties, conventions and regulations have served as a means of pressuring governments to improve human rights, in certain other contexts international human rights laws and movements have become a part of the problem. The constituents of international human rights movements have frequently been criticized for being complicit with neoliberal and neocolonial projects and policies. Continue reading
Call for Papers for the CNHH sessions at the 2019 CHA Congress.
Deadline to submit: October 1.
The CNHH sponsored sessions at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association in Vancouver in 2019 will be on Official Development Assistance, especially questions of training and education in the aid field, universities and internationalization, other aspects of settler colonialism and humanitarianism, Canada and international aid organizations, etc.
It is coordinated by David Meren, who is preparing a paper on “‘Development’: Settler Colonialism and the Origins, Life and Demise of the United Nations Regional Training Centre for Technical Assistance at UBC”.
Please write to him before October 1 <david.meren@umontreal.ca> if you are interested.
Envisioning Gratitude: Armenian Orphans in Canada
by Sandrine Murray
The Armenian Genocide was the result of the Ottoman government’s destruction of 1.5 million Armenians, most of them citizens within the empire. This was during and after the First World War. Most academics place the beginning of the genocide in 1915, though there are various accounts of violence against the Christian minority in the Ottoman empire before then. The Armenian Genocide is often seen as the first modern genocide, though to this day the term has been rejected by Turkey to describe what happened. Continue reading
A Quick-and-Dirty Guide to What’s Worth Keeping Forever
by Sarah Glassford, PhD, MLIS
McGill University, 7-8 March 2019
Patti Tamara Lenard (University of Ottawa) and Laura Madakoro (McGill University)
In recent decades, there has been a great deal of attention given to modern sanctuary practices,
ranging from the sanctuary offered to asylum seekers from Central America in the 1980s to recent
efforts to declare university campuses, cities and states sanctuary spaces. Although much of the
focus has been on contemporary activities in the United States, sanctuary is a global, and deeply
historic phenomenon. Continue reading
This post is cross-posted in partnership with ActiveHistory.ca
by Jill Campbell-Miller, PhD and Ryan Kirkby, PhD, MLIS
In general, historiography and historical methods courses do a good job in teaching students to be skeptical of their sources. As undergraduate and graduate students, we learn to scrutinize what we read, hear, or see. Yet while historians may be familiar with how to critique the sources themselves, rarely do we look up from a given document and examine the place where it is located, or think about how the document arrived in the archives. This is particularly true of written documents that emerge from government. Historians do not always critically engage with the organizational structure of the files, or think about how a certain structure came into being. This might seem somewhat “inside baseball” to historians, who usually leave such concerns in the hands of archivists. Exploring organizational descriptions on archival websites is not for the faint of heart, and rarely make much sense to the untrained observer. But considering these issues is important, because the history of how government departments change over time influences how documents come to be organized, influencing the history that emerges from this research. Continue reading
In October 2018, the Oral History Association will be gathering in Montreal for their annual conference. CNHH member, Dr. Isabel Campbell, will be presenting a paper. In addition, Dr. Campbell introduced the Network to the associated oral history and multimedia project presented in association with the OHA and Oral History at Concordia University. Any member interested should visit the OHA website for information on their annual conference (October 2018 @ Concordia University, Montreal QC) or the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University for information on the multimedia project. Likewise, the CNHH Event posting may be found here.
The program for this exhibition of the COHDS Research Centre at Concordia may be found here.
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
