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Sixteenth Bulletin of the CNHH, May 2025

May 28, 2025 / / 0 Comments

CONTENT

  1. CNHH at Congress 2025, George Brown College or virtual 
    • Annual general meeting 
  2. Events
  3. News from members
  4. Archives news
  5. Common initiatives from members
  6. Blogs & talks published by the CNHH
  7. Welcome to new members
  8. Staying Connected

I. CONGRESS 2025 GEORGE BROWN COLLEGE

Monday June 2 from 15:30 to 17:00 in WFL-703: 

Rethinking Vietnam: New Canadian Diplomatic, Defence, and Development

Perspectives on the Vietnam War Chair : Tim Sayle

  • Brendan Kelly, Mission Impossible: Canadian Diplomacy and the Search for Peace in Vietnam
  • Jean-Michel Turcotte, Cold War Theatre: The Official History of Canadian Military

Observers in Vietnam, 1954-1973

  • Susan Armstrong-Reid, Claire Culhane: Humanitarian, Activist, or Anarchist?

CNHH ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

Monday June 2, from 12: 00 to 13:30

The Annual meeting of the CNHH will take place on, in WLF – 531 or virtually at https://carleton-ca.zoom.us/j/6543041746 ) Jean-Michel Turcotte will be in the room, and Dominique Marshall will hold the virtual meeting. Please contact them for more information JEAN-MICHEL.TURCOTTE@forces.gc.ca or dominique_marshall@carleton.ca

  • Two international visiting scholars will be our special guests: Jonathan Crossen (Finland) and Henrique Schlumberger (Brazil)
  • We will discuss, among other things, possible theme for a 2026 roundtable, possible publication of a blog out of the 2024 panel on “Local histories of famine relief: food, (in)security, justice and nature at the village/micro level.”

II. EVENTS

Tracing the History of Indigenous Women’s Internationalism: An Afternoon with Dr Jonathan Crossen

When: Wednesday June 25 from 1:00 to 3:00

Where: Lounge of the Department of History of Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, Paterson Hall 433.

Image: Letterhead from the Second International Indigenous Women’s Conference (August 1990) sponsored by Sáráhkká, the Sámi Women’s Association

Dr Crossen is Associate Professor at the Centre for Sámi Studies at UiT, the Arctic University of Norway & Visiting Scholar at Carleton University, Department of History

He will present his work on Indigenous Women’s Internationalism for 45 minutes. An exchange will follow, including a report on the research he is conducting in Ottawa this June on the international aid work of Inuit Circumpolar Council, and discussions on common interests.

The event is co-hosted by the Canadian Network on Humanitarian History (CNHH) and Carleton University Department of History. To know more, read Dr Crossen’s blog on the CNHH website: International cooperation between Indigenous peoples in the late twentieth century : inter-governmental undertakings and the history of Indigenous rights, May 5, 2025.

A virtual version will be streamed at this address: https://carleton-ca.zoom.us/j/6543041746 

Please contact Dominique Marshall (dominque_marshall@carleton.ca ) for more information.

III. NEWS FROM MEMBERS

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). See more details of the publication in a CNHH website blog post here.

Recent publications from CNHH member Jean-Michel Turcotte:

CNHH members Sonya de Laat, Valérie Gorin, Nassisse Solomon and Dominique Marshall successfully shared their exhibition “Artificial Global Health Images In and Before the Era of Artificial Intelligence” at McMaster University (February 2025), Carleton University (March-May 2025), and the Humanitarian Network and Partnership Week in Geneva, Switzerland (April 2025). Financial support provided through 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. The exhibition continues its travels, and will be next seen at Western University in the fall of 2025.

CHA-funded exhibition on display in Geneva, Switzerland for HNPW2025. Photo: C. Lang.

Building on the exhibition above, CNHH member Sonya de Laat successfully secured a SSHRC Connections grant to host a workshop at the Brocher Foundation in Hermance, Switzerland from 4-6 June 2025 on the topic of Artiificial Global Health Images. In this first of its kind workshop, co-hosts Sonya de Laat and Arsenii Alenichev (ITB Belgium) are bringing together photographers, aid practitioners, a diverse range of scholars (from media studies, histories of aid and international development, and bioethics), and aid communications specialists from the ‘global north and south’ to discuss what is at stake when artificial images become more prevalent, particularly when those images are reproducing historic wrongs and fakeries of different sorts (e.g., staging, racial pseudo-science). Workshop collaborators include CNHH members Valérie Gorin, Nassisse Solomon and Dominique Marshall.

IV. ARCHIVES NEWS

New CUSO Accession

Archives & Special Collections acquired tape recorded interviews that were intended, and used, as background for Ian Smillie’s 1985 book about CUSO, The Land of Lost Content.  Some of the interviews were conducted by Peter Hoffman.  The interviews cover various topics related to CUSO, so they provide additional context and background to the physical records ASC has related to CUSO generally.

Activist Archive, Canada (new online archive)

A new online archive is under construction on the history of environmental and peace organizations in Canada. Where major archives favour government documents and those of influential men, the Activist Archive Canada at https://activistarchive.ca/ will prioritize the records of non-governmental organizations by preserving them and making them accessible online. Crucially, the plan is to add descriptions and other metadata instead of simply uploading context-less scans.

First up is the Pacific People’s Partnership (PPP), a Canadian NGO marking its 50th anniversary. Based in Victoria BC, PPP is the only Canadian registered charity with a focus on the Pacific Islands. It works, in particular, to link Indigenous people in the Islands and in what is now Canada. With funds from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, a team led by David Webster of Bishop’s University has digitized PPP’s paper records and made most of them available online at https://activistarchive.ca/pacific-peoples-parternship

The work involved digitizing paper records and photos, describing them using international archival system ISAD(G), and uploading them to the online archive, powered by the Access to memory (AtoM) system.

Next up is the Mae Sot Educational Project (MSEP), based in Sherbrooke, Quebec. MSEP has for 20 years been linking Canadian students and community members from Quebec’s Eastern Townships to refugees from Burma living in the town of Mae Sot, in Thailand.

Interested in contributing and being involved? Papers to share? Want to donate? Get in touch! dwebster@ubishops.ca

V. COMMON INITIATIVES FROM MEMBERS

Dominique Marshall received a three years SSHRC “Insight” Grant starting this Spring to write a monograph on​ the role of Oxfam in Canada from its foundation in the UK in 1943 to the unique role of the growing Oxfam confederation in the making of Canada’s transnational engagements with the global humanitarian regime since then. The program is based, among other things, on the existing work of archival collection done by several humanitarian veterans who are members of the CNHH. The provisional title is “UNEXPECTED SOLIDARITIES: THE ROLE OF OXFAM IN CANADIAN TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY 1943 – 2003.” The project includes a community-based archival component. Co-applicant and archivist, Chris Trainor, will help organise and make available the testimonies and documents gathered over the last 15 years, in close relation with officers of Oxfam Canada, who collaborated in the application. The team will use the grant to build a systematic depository of Oxfam materials at Carleton University, and build permanent bridges between this Fonds and similar collections, for the benefit of historians and NGOs.

VI. BLOGS & TALKS PUBLISHED BY THE CNHH SINCE THE LAST BULLETIN (June 2024)

Severyan Dyakonov, Project on the International Red Cross Movement and the Cold War Divide, the 1940s–1980s, 22 May 2025.

Jonathan Crossen, International cooperation between Indigenous peoples in the late twentieth century : inter-governmental undertakings and the history of Indigenous rights, 5 May 2025.

Jill Campbell-Miller, Shocked, but not Surprised: The End of USAID in Historical Perspective. 18 April 2025.

Henrique Schlumberger Vitchmichen, Refugee Letters & the Ukrainian Committee for War Victims’ Relief in World War II, 2 April 2025.

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!

VII. WELCOME TO NEW MEMBERS

Peter Baltutis

Associate Professor, History and Religious Studies, St. Mary’s University

Email: peter.baltutis@stmu.ca

Dr. Peter Baltutis earned his Ph.D. in the History of Christianity/Theology from Regis St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology in the University of Toronto.  His doctoral dissertation was the first history of Development and Peace, the official international development organization of the Catholic Church in Canada and the Canadian member of Caritas Internationalis (a network of 162 national Catholic relief and development agencies working across the world).  His research focuses on the historical and theological development of the Catholic social tradition in Canada and the role that faith-based NGOs play in international development and humanitarian aid.  Currently, he is an associate professor of history and religious studies at St. Mary’s University in Calgary, where he also holds the Catholic Women’s League (CWL) Endowed Chair for Catholic Studies.       

The full list of members is on the CNHH website.

VIII. STAYING CONNECTED

Social Media Connection Update!

The CNHH is moving to Bluesky, follow us at@aidhistory.bsky.social

Let’s Talk About Humanitarian Archives: 2023 CNHH Roundtable Leads to New Publication

January 15, 2025 / / 0 Comments

by Sarah Glassford

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.

CfP: French Association for Canadian Studies 48th Annual Conference.

October 27, 2024 / / 0 Comments

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.)

Proposals must be sent by e-mail to the organizing committee by December 1, 2024: afec2025@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

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.

The full call for papers is available here.

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.

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)

Microsoft Teams meeting

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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

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

CfP: THE LEAGUE OF RED CROSS SOCIETIES IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES, 1919-1991

August 24, 2022 /

A TWO-DAY SYMPOSIUM WILL BE HELD AT THE IFRC, GENEVA, ON THURSDAY AND FRIDAY 15-16 JUNE 2023.

Since 2019, members of the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project “Resilient Humanitarianism” have been working on aspects of the history of the League of Red Cross Societies. This has been a collaboration of interdisciplinary academics from Australia, Britain, and France. As a finale of the project, we seek scholars of the Red Cross Movement and Red Cross and Red Crescent national societies to contribute to a 2-day symposium to share their current research on the League of Red Cross Societies, discuss and analyze the history and impact of this important international organization that has been under-historicized to date.

From its beginnings in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, through to 1991 when it became the International Federation of Red Cross Red Crescent (IFRC), we have sought to understand how the League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS), the world’s largest volunteer network, survived the turbulent interwar period and Second World War, and expanded through the decolonization and globalization era of the Cold War. Examining the history of this transnational humanitarianism organization offers new insights into how organizations respond to various geopolitical, cultural, and social shifts over time and place.

For this symposium, we seek contributions from scholars working on major platforms of the League of Red Cross Societies such as health and public health policy, disaster management, aid and relief, the Junior Red Cross, and the development of national Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and League infrastructure, and international collaborations with other international bodies such as WHO and the United Nations. We are particularly interested in hearing from those working on the post-World War II period and the emergence of new national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies following national independence and how those new national Societies interacted with the League in Geneva.

Questions to consider include, but are not limited to:

  • How did the LRCS develop as an institution of its own? How did it navigate the period 1920-45? What programs did it support?
  • How did the LRCS interact with newly established national Red Cross/Red Crescent societies of recently independent countries in the Middle-East, Africa and Asia?
  • What programs did the LRCS establish in the post-WWII period, and were they successful on the ground? (eg. public health, disaster relief, first aid, etc.)
  • How did the LRCS navigate the Cold War and its relations with Soviet republics and their allies?
  • What role have gender, volunteering, and climate change played? How can we explain the League’s institutional resilience in the twentieth century?

We will be joined by Emeritus Professor David P. Forsythe (University of Nebraska-Lincoln). A welcome reception will be held on the evening of Wednesday 14 June at the IFRC.

Please send a 300-word abstract and a 100-word biography to resilienthumsymposium2023@gmail.com by 9 September 2022. Contact melanie.oppenheimer@anu.edu.au for more information.

Convenors and Project Team Members:

Professor Melanie Oppenheimer (ANU) – Lead Chief Investigator

Dr. Rosemary Cresswell (Strathclyde) – Partner Investigator

Dr. Romain Fathi (Flinders/Sciences Po) – Chief Investigator

Professor Susanne Schech (Flinders) – Chief Investigator

Professor Neville Wylie (Stirling) – Partner Investigator

Dr. Kate Laing (ANU) – Project Officer/Research Assistant

Jordan Evans (Flinders) – PhD student

CNHH Logo Long

CfP: The Red Cross Movement, Voluntary Organizations, and Reconstruction in Western Europe in the 20th century

July 31, 2019 /

From H-Human Rights

This one-day symposium will be held at the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po (Paris, France) on Friday 12 June 2020

Historical research on voluntary or non-government organizations and their contribution to the reconstruction of states, communities and humanitarian assistance to civilian populations following conflicts, epidemics and disasters through the twentieth century has generally focused on non-Western European countries. The historiography suggests that it is mostly in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa that natural or man-made disasters have occurred, and that these places have been the focus for humanitarian assistance. The major geographical spheres of interest for Red Cross societies and non-government organizations to provide assistance to populations in times of severe crises do not generally include Western Europe, except for World War II. Rather, the humanitarian enterprise is viewed through the binary of the Global North/Global South, those who save and those who are saved. Continue reading

CfP: The African Commonwealth – Strasbourg 14-15 November 2019 (new deadline, 1 July 2019)

April 23, 2019 /

original post on H-Diplo by Mélanie Torrent

The African Commonwealth : perceptions, realities and limits (new deadline / new dates)

14-15 November 2019
Institute of Political Studies, Strasbourg

The next Commonwealth Summit, due to be held in Kigali in 2020, promises to give Africa new visibility in the politics of the governmental delegations and civil society organisations which will converge in Rwanda. The youngest member of the Commonwealth, having joined in 2009, a joint member of the Francophonie whose secretary general is now former Rwandan Foreign and International Cooperation Secretary Louise Mushikiwabo, and an active player in global, continental and regional dynamics, Rwanda will be an important space for the Commonwealth to show that it is an attractive multilateral organisation for the 21st century – and for observers to assess this critically. On Africa, beside a number of success stories, the ongoing “Anglophone crisis” in Cameroon will raise difficult but urgent questions. More generally, the renegotiation of the Cotonou Agreements and the question of the Economic Partnership Agreements, the redefinition of the UK’s relations with the overall Commonwealth (including in the current uncertain context of Brexit) and the interest shown by African states in either re-entering (Zimbabwe) or joining (Togo) the Commonwealth also makes a re-assessment of the meaning of the Commonwealth in Africa and for Africa an important and timely issue. Continue reading

CfP: Successes and Challenges in Post World War I Relief Activities in Austria and Central Europe

April 10, 2019 /

“Why Do We Have To Help Foreign Children, Don’t We Have Enough Poor Children In Our Own Country?”*
Successes and Challenges in Post World War I Relief Activities in Austria and Central Europe

Symposium to be held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, September 26-27, 2019

jointly organized by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the American Austrian Foundation and the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation

Call for Papers

In the spring of 1919, the American Relief Administration under the leadership of Herbert Hoover started to feed Austrian schoolchildren, a program that continued until 1922 and supplied at its peak more than 300.000 lunches a day. Together with further American as well as other international programs, this project brought major relief to a country starved after four years of war and its aftermath. Child mortality had increased by 60% from prewar levels and in 1919 78% of all Austrian children were considered malnourished by teams of international physicians. Continue reading

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