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Fifteenth Bulletin of the CNHH

June 13, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Fifteenth Bulletin of the CNHH, June 2024

CONTENT

  • CNHH at Congress 2024, McGill University or virtual  
  • 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: Tuesday, 18 June 2024, 10:30am-12:00pm
  • Meeting ID: 933 0113 9171 Passcode: 340020
  • 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: 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.
  • Meeting ID: 962 9445 6255  Passcode: 459674
  • Special guest: Yvon Pomerleau (see Archives News below)

II. NEWS FROM MEMBERS

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 book is an open access publication and can be downloaded for free, using this link: https://biblioscout.net/book/10.25162/9783515136563.

He also has a recent journal article in the Journal of Contemporary History. Here is the link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00220094241241054 .

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.

III. ARCHIVES NEWS

Screenshot of the French African Graphic Novels collection accessible through Carleton University’s Archives and Special Collections.

In the Winter of 2024, Carleton University Archives and Special Collections acquired a collection of French African Graphic Novels donated by the Dominican Brother and missionary in Rwanda Yvon Pomerleau. The catalogue can be seen here: https://ocul-crl.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vid=01OCUL_CRL:CRL_DEFAULT&collectionId=81457465220005153

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)

Jonathon Zimmer,  “Top 5 Reads on the Historical Role of Media in the Ethiopian Famine Crisis of 1984”, 13 February 2024. From the series “Essential Reads in the History of humanitarianism.”

Jill Campbell-Miller, “Essential Reads on the history of Development”, 9 November 2023. From the series “Essential Reads in the History of humanitarianism.”

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

The full list of members is on the CNHH website.

If you haven’t followed the CNHH on Twitter, please do so!

Feel free to tag us in your announcements, and we will retweet!

@AidHistoryCan

Sonya de Laat, Bulletin Editor

Copyright © 2024 Canadian Network on Humanitarian History, all rights reserved.

Fourteenth Bulletin of the CNHH

November 10, 2023 /

Fourteenth Bulletin of the CNHH, November 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.

II. NEWS FROM MEMBERS

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.

More on the project and the full team that can be found here: https://www.oxjhubioethics.org/research/putting-people-and-diseases-into-the-picture

III. ARCHIVES NEWS

For the last three months, the Archival Rescue team based at Carleton University Archives and Special Collections (https://library.carleton.ca/asc)  has been supporting the cataloguing of the library of the Native North American Travelling College (https://www.nnatc.org/). See the blog by Research Assistant Richard Marchese, on the CNHH website: https://aidhistory.ca/creating-an-archive-for-the-native-north-american-travelling-college-a-research-internship-completed-at-carleton-university/

IV. COMMON INITIATIVES FROM MEMBERS

  • 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.

V. BLOGS & TALKS PUBLISHED BY THE CNHH SINCE THE LAST BULLETIN

CNHH Presents: Essential Reads in the History of Humanitarianism—Top 5 Resources on Humanitarianism, Development, and Photography, as recommended by Sonya de Laat.

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)

Richard Marchese: “Creating an Archive for the Native North American Traveling College. A Research Internship Completed at Carleton University” (cross-posted from I-CUREUS blog) – early October.

CNHH Presents: Essential Reads in the History of Humanitarianism—Top 5 Reads on the History of Development, as recommended by Jill Campbell-Miller.

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. 

The full list of members is on the CNHH website.

If you haven’t followed the CNHH on Twitter, please do so!

Feel free to tag us in your announcements, and we will retweet!

@AidHistoryCan

Sonya de Laat, Bulletin Editor

Copyright © 2023 Canadian Network on Humanitarian History, all rights reserved.

Thirteenth Bulletin of the CNHH

May 24, 2023 /

Thirteenth Bulletin of the CNHH, May 2023

It has been more than a year since the last bulletin of May 2022. We hope that you are all well and that you will continue to send news, posts and announcements.

CONTENT

  • CNHH at Congress 2023, York University or virtual
    • Round table on humanitarian archives – 30th May
    • Annual general meeting – 29th May
    • CASID panels
  • News from members
  • Archives news
  • Common initiatives from members
  • Blogs & talks published by the CNHH
  • Welcome to new members

I. CONGRESS 2023 YORK UNIVERSITY


CNHH ROUNDTABLE, ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING & OTHER NEWS

Roundtable: “Ahistorical Aid: The Hidden Costs of Historical Amnesia in NGOs” (Session 48) 

  • Format: Roundtable, hybrid format (online + in-person). 
  • Venue: York University, Toronto – Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Building (DB) room 0016 + online
  • Date & Time: Tuesday, 30th May 2023, 10:30–noon (EST)
  • Chair: Sarah Glassford, Archivist, University of Windsor
  • Panelists: 
    • David Webster, Historian, Bishop’s University
    • Fabrice Weissman, Aid practitioner, Médecins Sans Frontières (Paris)
    • Chris Trainor, Archivist, Carleton University
    • Melanie Oppenheimer, Historian, Australian National University
  • Description: This roundtable will explore the intertwined subjects of archives, history, and aid work in the world of NGOs. The panelists bring overlapping experiences as historians of aid, aid practitioners in the field, advocates for historical and archival preservation, and observers of aid organizations’ uses of history. Rather than the traditional approach of hearing a series of short talks followed by audience Q&A, in this roundtable the chair will ask the panelists to discuss a series of questions in an interactive fashion, with the goal of engaging one another and the audience in a true dialogue on the subject of how NGOs do and don’t use their own histories, why that is, and why it matters for both historians and for the organizations themselves.
  • To participate:
    • Registered attendees of the CHA conference at Congress may attend in person or can join online via a link provided by Congress. The full program of the CHA conference is here
    • Community members not otherwise involved in Congress may join in person at the above location. At this time, it is not possible to join online without paying a registration fee for the CHA conference and Congress. A “community pass” to Congress is available for $55, plus the CHA registration fee (student, full-time employed, retiree & unwaged rates available). See information on the Congress website.


The Annual meeting of the CNHH will take place on Monday, 29th May from 12:00 to 1:30pm (EST)

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  • The agenda will include research updates, David’s Webster suggestion for a project of digitization of humanitarian archives, plans for the future, website update, sponsored panel for 2024, and appointment of future officers. To add other points, please email Sarah Glassford, who will be chairing the meeting (sarah.glassford@uwindsor.ca ).

Panels of interest: Canadian Association for the Study of International Development (CASID)

  • David Webster Open film screening presented by CASID, ‘WHEN I SAY AFRICA’ – ADVANCE FILM SCREENING AND DISCUSSION AT CASID 2023 https://casid-acedi.ca/annual-conference
  • International Development Policy Making in Canada: Actors, Politics and Discourse – 29th May, 1:30 to 3 pm, McLaughlin College MC 215
  • Reflections on International Development Studies in Canada: Change, Challenges and new Directions – 30th May, 1:30 – 3 pm, Vari Hall VHC
  • Deconstructions Development: a panel on practical approaches to achieve justice and equality (my panel) – 31st May, 1:30 – 3 pm, McLaughlin College, MC 215

 

II. NEWS FROM MEMBERS

  • Sonya de Laat and Nassisse Solomon are collaborating with colleagues at Oxford and Johns Hopkins on a fledgling project exploring the decolonization of global health imagery though a transdisciplinary bioethics and historical lens: Towards an ethics of global health visuals.  The collaboration was initiated between Sonya de Laat and Arsenii Alinechev, a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford, while Dr. de Laat was a visiting scholar at the Ethox Centre last June. The project is currently funded through Dr. Alinechev’s postdoctoral fellowship as a subproject to the GLIDEnetwork. The project team includes CNHH members Sonya de Laat and Nassisse Solomon among the full team that can be found here: https://www.oxjhubioethics.org/research/putting-people-and-diseases-into-the-picture
  • Laura Madakoro, supported by an Early Researcher Award, launched The Disaster Lab at Carleton University. Inspired by very real climate change crises confronting our global community, and the prospect of hundreds of thousands of environmental refugees in the coming years, this project seeks to learn and better understand historic responses to disasters at the local, provincial, federal, and global levels.
  • Dominique Marshall continued the series of joint interviews with Oxfam Canada veterans, conducted in collaboration with Susan Johnson, Marc Allain and Lawrence Cummings.  published three articles: “Teaching Human Rights History,”in The American Review of Canadian Studies; “Creating, Archiving and Exhibiting Disability History: The Oral Histories of Disability Activists of the Carleton University Disability Research Group” (with T. Jennissen, C. Trainor, and B. Robertson), in First Monday; and “Supporting Research on Gender and Design  Amongst STEAM Researchers in the Souths: A Case Study of Subsumption in Design Methods” (with C. Del Gaudio and B. Hallgrimsson), in DRS2022: Bilbao. Dr. Marshall was also involved in the Gendered Design in STEAM project.
  • On 9 May 2023, the chiefs of Canadian humanitarian agencies, members of the Canadian Humanitarian Response Network (HRN), met in Ottawa to discuss issues they face, among them the Canadian response to rising levels of international migration and increased refugee flows, the challenges for humanitarian agencies of sanctions on illegal regimes in crisis situations, and financing mechanisms available to civil society organizations for their humanitarian work.  Presenters included the UN High Commissioner for Refugees representative in Canada, Matthieu Kimmel, the Director of humanitarian policy at Global Affairs Canada, and Hunter McGill, Senior Fellow at the School of International Development, University of Ottawa.
  • David Webster will present a film at CASID (see above) With the help of a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant, David Webster has been working with the Pacific Peoples Partnership to digitize their archives. PPP was formed in 1975. Based in Victoria, it is the only Canadian NGO working on the Pacific Islands. Its first overseas project, support to build cooking houses in Tonga after a natural disaster, is described at https://theconversation.com/canadian-reconstruction-aid-to-tonga-40-years-ago-points-the-way-today-175506. The digitization stage of this project is now complete and major materials will be described over the course of Summer 2023. We expect to be able to hire a student to work on describing and uploading the materials this summer. If interested, please contact dwebster@ubishops.ca 
  • Stephen Osei-Owusu convened the successful Shannon Lecture Series in History – Spring 2022, on the regulation of natural resource extraction in Canada and Africa.

III. ARCHIVES NEWS

  • Carleton University’s Archives and Special Collections has returned to acquiring personal collections after the pandemic’s ripple effects posed some issues with acquiring and processing archival donations. Multiple donations that were received over the last year are still being processed to be made accessible and discoverable for researchers.

IV. COMMON INITIATIVES FROM MEMBERS

  • At an informal meeting held in January 2022, the CNHH adopted a small Steering Committee. If you are interested in participating in, please get in touch!
  • Caitlin Arbour, Carleton university Undergraduate Student in History, has continued to research the history of Farm Radio International by conducting interviews with veterans of their training program in several countries of the African continent over two academic terms. This has been made possible by a grant from the I-CUREUS program at Carleton University, and within the Practicum Program of the department of History.

V. BLOGS & TALKS PUBLISHED BY THE CNHH SINCE THE LAST BULLETIN

VI. WELCOME TO NEW MEMBERS

  • Caitlin Arbour, undergraduate student in history, Carleton University. Caitlin works with Sylvia Harrison of Farm Radio International at a project of oral history, under the guidance of the CNHH.
  • Claire Lefort-Rieu is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the Centre Population et Développement (Ceped) in Paris. For several years, she worked for international NGOs providing assistance to forced displaced people in the Middle East and Africa. Thanks to her professional and academic experience, she practices a methodology of “networked double ethnography” with both aid actors and their so-called “beneficiaries”. After working on religious “minorities” among the Iraqi refugees, she now studies forced migration governance in Cameroon.
  • Rachel Sandwell, Faculty Lecturer – McGill University – History and Women’s and Gender Studies. Dr. Sandwell’s first book looked at South African women’s exile politics, examining the work of women activists when the major South African resistance movements were based outside South Africa, in other African countries. This led to her current research on NGO, including Canadian NGO, relationships with African liberation movements in the 1960s-1980s. She is exploring how NGOs balanced support for the ambitions of liberation organizations with unease over the military aspect of these movements, and how the movements, NGOs, and African states hosting the liberation movements navigated the differences and overlaps between refugees and political exiles.
  • Jonathon Zimmer, MA Student, University of Regina – History; BA (Thompson Rivers University) Jonathon’s fields of interest involve a broad range of topics pertaining to the history of Canadian reaction to humanitarian crises. For instance, his MA thesis explores the reaction of the Canadian media to the Ethiopian Famine of 1984, and how this influenced federal approaches to the crisis. The media’s role in exposing the scope and scale of the Ethiopian famine, and in evaluating the effectiveness of the government’s response, played a crucial role in shaping that response. The shock value of what was shown on TV was a powerful call to action, and Canadians expected their government to step up.
  • The full list of members is on the CNHH website.

If you haven’t followed the CNHH on Twitter, please do so! Feel free to tag us in your announcements, and we will retweet! @AidHistoryCan

Helen Kennedy, Bulletin Coordinator

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