Tag: Conference (Page 1 of 3)

Thirteenth Bulletin of the CNHH

May 24, 2023 / / 0 Comments

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

Join on your computer, mobile app or room device

Click here to join the meeting

Meeting ID: 262 670 586 720
Passcode: dmmh7U

Download Teams | Join on the web

Or call in (audio only)

+1 647-749-9426,,644109500#   Canada, Toronto

(866) 603-5721,,644109500#   Canada (Toll-free)

Phone Conference ID: 644 109 500#

Find a local number | Reset PIN

Learn More | Meeting options

  • 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

CfP: World History Conference–Migrants and Refugees

January 20, 2019 /

From H-World.  Original post by Mauricio Borrero

CFP: St. John’s University World History Theory and Practice Conference: Migrants and Refugees

**Proposal deadline extended to February 1, 2019

Migration, whether voluntary or involuntary, lies at the heart of world history. The movement of people, regardless of circumstances, and their cultures, family networks, foods, and material objects continues to reshape society at local, regional, and global scales. These movements ought to inform the ways educators frame and teach about the past. That human beings, texts, ideas, and things have always been in motion undermines static representations of global society. Grappling with the implications of these migration flows remains an exciting challenge for practitioners of world history. Continue reading

CfP: Imperial Legacies of 1919

October 13, 2018 /

Contact: imperial1919unt@gmail.com
Conference Date: April 19-20, 2019

CfP Deadline for Papers and Panels: December 31, 2018.

Roundtable Participant Proposal Deadline: January 31, 2019.

Undergraduate Student Poster Competition Proposal Deadline: February 15, 2019.

 

Journalist and author Shrabani Basu will provide a distinguished lecture on Indian soldiers related to her recent work: For King and Another Country (2015). Prior to the conference, she will also host a screening of Victoria and Abdul, a film based on her book of the same name. Historian of the British Empire Dr. Susan Kingsley Kent will provide the keynote address. Her esteemed works include Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918-1931 (2009); The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (2011) and The Global Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 (2012). Continue reading

History Inhabits Each of Us: Creative Engagements with Personal Story in Troubling Times

June 25, 2018 /

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.

Continue reading

« Older posts

© 2024 Canadian Network on Humanitarian History

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑