Category: Bulletins (Page 1 of 2)

Thirteenth Bulletin of the CNHH

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

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

Twelfth Bulletin of the CNHH, May 2022

Twelfth Bulletin of the CNHH, May 2022

The Twelfth Bulletin of the CNHH has now been sent out to the membership.  If you missed it, the complete PDF of the bulletin can be found here: Twelfth Bulletin PDF

It has been more than a year since the last bulletin of May 2021. We hope that you are all well and that you will continue to send news, posts and announcements.

I. PANEL AND ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

The annual CNHH sponsored panel on Legacies of Colonialism in Africa: Reconsidering Conquest, Capitalism, and Transnationalism in the 19th and 20th Centuries Héritages du colonialisme en Afrique : nouveau regard sur la conquête,
le capitalisme et le transnationalisme aux XIXe et XXe siècles  will take place on Wednesday the 18th of May, from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm Ottawa time.

We are looking forward to watching our colleagues:

  • Stephen Osei Owusu (PhD candidate, Carleton University), “The Mankessim Riots of 1849: a Case of Contested Ethno-forestry practices or Conflict between ‘Europeanized’ and Indigenous Africans.”
  • Simplice Ayangma Bonoho (Banting Fellow, Bishop’s University), « Le « Centre de Rééducation des handicapés de Yaoundé » (CRHY) : Un projet humanitaire
    d’envergure ? : Pour une relecture des relations diplomatiques canado-
    camerounaises (1968-1980). »

  • Chair | Président : Robin Gendron

The full program of the CHA virtual conference is here: https://cha-shc.ca/_uploads/626ac9b5a803e.pdf  Every participant must register for congress here: https://fhss.swoogo.com/22-registration-inscription. Please note that the CHA has waived the registration fee for the CHA Annual Meeting for graduate students, unemployed and precarious historians.

The Annual meeting of the CNHH will take place at lunch time on the same day, on Wednesday the 18th from 12:30 to 2:00 Ottawa time. The agenda will include research updates, plans for the future, website update, discussion of the website, sponsored panel for 2023, and appointment of future officers. Let us know if you would like to add other points. Here is where to register: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/annual-meeting-of-the-canadian-network-on-humanitarian-history-2022-tickets-333051896187

II. NEWS FROM MEMBERS

Jill Campbell-Miller presented her post-doctoral work on “Hydroelectric Dams and the Hinterlands in Canada and India, 1953-1958” at the Ottawa Historical Association on February 15. The recording will be posted shortly on the website of the OHA.

Sarah Glassford started a series of best reads in humanitarian history, last Fall, in the blog of the CNHH. Three have been published so far.

Dominique Marshall published two articles: “‘CIDA Gives You the World!’ Visual Media and Development Education in Canadian Schools: 1980-2000” & “Ethical Traditions in Humanitarian Photography and the Challenges of the Digital Age  – Four Conversations with Canadian Communications Officers”, in theJournal of Humanitarian Affairs, Special issue on “Humanitarian Action in the Age of Visual Media: The Past and Present of Humanitarian Communication” Fall 2021, which came from a CNHH panel at the Canadian Historical Association two years previously.

Stephen Osei-Owusu is convening the Shannon Lecture Series in History – Spring 2022, on the regulation of natural resource extraction in Canada and Africa. Many NGOs are involved.

III. WELCOME TO NEW MEMBERS

William Plowright, Lecturer – Peace and Conflict Studies, School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, who recently authored Armed Groups and International Legitimacy: Child Soldiers in Intra-State Conflict. (Routledge, 2021)

Robert Anthony Ventresca, Academic Dean (Interim), King’s University College at Western University.

IV. ARCHIVES NEWS

In collaboration with Carleton University’s Archives and Special Collections we helped the Canadian Council of Professional Fish Harvesters (CCPFH) to prepare a successful application to deposit its archives at Library and Archives Canada, which was successful.

The recordings of the twelve group conversations of the “Oxfam Canada between 1964 and 1990: A collaborative memory project” coordinated by Oxfam veterans Marc Allain, Susan Johnson and Lawrence Cummings, with the support of Dominique Marshall, will be deposited at Carleton University Archives and Special Collections later in 2022.

V. COMMON INITIATIVES FROM MEMBERS

At an informal meeting held in January 2022, the CNHH adopted a small Steering Committee. Here are the responsibilities.

Blog and website: Sarah Glassford

Bulletin: Helen Kennedy and Dominique Marshall

Twitter: Lydia Wytenbroek

CHA work

  • Regular updates: Helen Kennedy
    • Annual meetings: Nassisse Solomon
    • Panel at Congress: Jill Campbell-Miller 2022 Nassisse Solomon & David Webster afterwards
    • Community links: Dominique Marshall

Events: Lydia Wytenbroek                                       

Grants, joint research projects: Dominique Marshall

On March 30, Lydia Wytenbroek organised the CNHH sponsored Book Launch for The NGO Moment: The Globalisation of Compassion from Biafra to Live Aid, written by CNHH long-time partner in Ireland, Kevin O-Sullivan, with guest speakers Ruth Compton Brouwer, John W. Foster, Laura Madokoro, and Ian Smillie.

VI. WORK WITH NGOS

Carleton fourth-year student Cailtin Arbour has started an internship with Farm radio International to produce oral histories of the impact of FRI on local communities on Africa, under the supervision of Sylvie Harrison.

VII. TEACHING

Fourth-year students of D. Marshall’s STEM in the History of Canadian Society and Policy course worked in collaboration with the master seminar of Soenke Kunkle on Science and Technology in Transnational Relations at the JFK Institute of North American Studies. The products of the nine transnational teams are posted on the teaching website Recipro: eight timelines of case studies Science and international humanitarianism. The German-based humanitarian transport drone company Wingcopter and the Canadian based NGO Farm Radio International accompanied the making of the projects.

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

Preserving the Legacy of Influential Canadian Humanitarian Lewis Perinbam (1925-2007), April 25, 2022, by Sarah Glassford.

Nursing, Empire, & Mobility: Lydia Wytenbroek on American Mission Nurses in Iran & Iranian Nurses in the U.S., 1907-1979, Webinar Report. March 2022, by Maia Luger.

Lost and Fonds. Declassification of Government Records in Canada., January 2022, by Isabel Campbell.

CNHH Presents: Essential Reads in the History of Humanitarianism, September 2021, by Sarah Glassford.

Was it really “different back then?” Reflecting on current global health ethics with a NFB film about CUSO, 1965, September 2021, by Sonya de Laat.

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

Copyright © 2022 Canadian Network on Humanitarian History, all rights reserved.

Eleventh Bulletin of the CNHH, May 2021

The Eleventh Bulletin of the CNHH has now been sent out to the membership.  If you missed it, the complete PDF of the bulletin can be found here: Bulletin of the CNHH May 2021 FINAL

It has been more than a year since the last bulletin of April 2020. We hope that you are all well and that you will continue to send news, posts and announcements.

  1. I. PANEL AND ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

The annual CNHH sponsored panel on “Making Connections with the Public: Alternative Approaches to Learning History” will take place on Monday May 31, from 11:00 to 12:15 Ottawa time, virtually. The program of the CHA virtual conference is here: https://cha-shc.ca/_uploads/6092c3d816fd7.pdf

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Tenth Bulletin of the CNHH, April 2020

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

I. CONGRESS AND WORKSHOP
Members of the CNHH panel on “Making Connections with the Public: Alternative Approaches to Learning History” prepared for the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association in London Ontario, which was cancelled due to COVID-19, have agreed to resubmit the same proposal for 2021 Annual Meeting of the CHA at the University of Alberta.

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