By: Dr. Valérie Gorin
Senior Lecturer, University of Lausanne &
Center for Education and Research in Humanitarian Action (CERAH)
Visiting Fellow, Carleton University
Mobilization, persuasion and denunciation : these strategic communications became popular forms of humanitarian advocacy in the 1980s, through visible media coups from Médecins Sans Frontières. However, a historical gap remains on the evolution of advocacy as a public, visual and media strategy. How were early advocacy campaigns imagined by humanitarian organisations ? What type of visual imagery and iconographic conventions were produced? How did they frame the position of humanitarian workers as bystanders ? This presentation explores these aspects, focusing on two pivotal periods:1) the rise of propaganda units with humanitarian cinema during the Eastern European famine in the early 1920s; 2) the diversification into public relations or campaigns units in the aftermath of the Biafran famine in the late 1960s.Dr. Gorin is developing a project on the history of humanitarian advocacy before and after WWII. It aims to understand the development of humanitarian communication and its visual culture by exploring the tensions with political activism and eyewitness strategies, using advocacy materials from ICRC, Save the Children, Oxfam and Terre des Hommes. As a historian and media scholar, her areas of research relate to the visual heritage of humanitarianism, the ideological values and power relationships inherent to the international relief movement, and how such representations affect global or national audiences. She will share her reflections on methodological and historical approaches to visual culture of humanitarian action.