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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
PhD Thesis Project - Common Humanity in Humanitarian Communication
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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Projects & Abstracts
2017-03-01
2021-09-06
2017-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Wouter Oomen
2017/03/01
Utrecht University
2036-461X
28
en
PhD Thesis Project - Common Humanity in Humanitarian Communication
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16302/17189
17
Common Humanity in Humanitarian Communication
Wouter Oomen / PhD Thesis Project
Utrecht University




   In discussing ‘“the human” as a political stake’, Vicki Squire notes that ‘the
category of “the human” is not given, but is made as such through humanitarian
interventions.’1 My dissertation assesses the construction of the human and
its political stakes by going beyond the practice of humanitarian intervention
as such and scrutinizing what can be called ‘humanitarian communication’.
This includes communicative practices of NGOs, charities and humanitarian
organizations in which the construction of the human is paramount since it often
relies on the imagination of a ‘common humanity’.2 This common humanity will
be studied in three different forms of campaigns, those on: disaster relief (event-
based campaigns; determined by their temporal nature) long term development
(presented to us as part of day-to-day life and shaped by their ongoing, structural
character) and conflict and human rights (campaigns dealing with delicate political
issues in the face of the supposedly unambiguous notion of human rights). It is
in these three different contexts that the question of what common humanity
entails is addressed.
   An example of such a campaign is ‘The Family Meal’; a campaign launched
by the World Food Program and a case study from which this dissertation
departs.3 At the start and end of all the videos of ‘The Family Meal’ intertitles
pose the question ‘What brings us together?’. The campaign aims at providing
a daily family meal for ‘the poorest and most vulnerable’ and with respect to
this, the question ‘What brings us together?’ plays out on two levels. The first is
situated on a local level in reference to the habit of a family sharing an evening
meal. Pointing to the moment when the different family members return home
and settle around the evening meal, the daily habit of having dinner signifies
togetherness on the local level. The second level is the global one, where the
family meal is presented as a universal custom, naturally belonging to the human


1
  Viki Squire, Post/humanitarian Border Politics between Mexico and the US: People, Places, Things
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2015), p. 33.
2
  Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
3
  See <http://www.familymeal.eu> [accessed April 09, 2017]

                                                     Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 28, Spring 2017
                                         Wouter Oomen


way of life, across national or cultural borders or boundaries. In one of the
campaign’s videos it is indeed stated that ‘it is important to convey that others,
even in dire circumstances, want to have those natural, normal activities which
are part of raising a family’ — thereby stressing both the role of the family unit
and its universality in deeming the family meal as a ‘natural, normal’ custom, that
cannot even be challenged by the most dire circumstances.
   Two interrelated yet contradictory claims stem from this example. Firstly, the
notion of a family meal pertains to both an idea of material well-being in the form
of a bare minimum of nutrition and to immaterial values in the form of family
life. The concept of a family meal boils down the notion of humanity to what is
perceived to be its essentials. Such an essentialization of universality in the name
of the human can be understood in terms of identity formation; which means to
go with Michel Agier’s theorization of ‘humanity as an identity’:

       This identity, as a generalized system of transparency, takes on the name of
    ‘humanity.’ Like the god Janus, humanity has a double-sided identity, which,
    however, does not express any alterity (no ‘other’ is allowed in this bounded and total
    representation). Its double is only the reflection of a wounded, suffering, or dying
    humanity. It becomes the ‘absolute victim,’ who is nothing else or other than absolute
    and essentialized humanity when it is suffering.4

   The foundation of humanity in the suffering body has for long been the primary
reason for attaching the notion of common humanity to the representation of
vulnerability. This means that humanitarian communication, which centralizes
the notion of human vulnerability ‘speaks the language of common humanity’.5
   Secondly, the claim made in the video (and the campaign as a whole) stresses
that it is important to convey that ‘others’ should be included in this idea of
common humanity — thereby distinguishing between those for whom inclusion
is deemed self-evident and those who can be understood as the ‘vulnerable
Other’. In this sense the discourse of ‘common humanity’ is structured and
produced hierarchically, despite its appeal to a natural, a priori truth. Indeed,
the production and reception of these campaigns is tied to local contexts. As
a result, the alleged human experience is imagined from the perspective of
those holding economic advantage and the ability to behold; bringing with it
a distinction between a fortunate spectator and an unfortunate ‘other’.6 As this
seems at odds with the idea of a global human experience, the question whether



4
  Michel Agier, ‘Humanity as an Identity and Its Political Effects (A Note on Camps and Humanitarian
Government)’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and
Development, 1.1 (2010), 29–45 (p. 31).
5
  Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2013), p. 30.
6
  Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).

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universalism is an ethnocentric phenomenon7 is as important as the question of
how universalism is defined in mediated encounters between different places.
   After taking ‘The Family Meal’ as an anchor point to explore the theoretical
framework of common humanity, the dissertation will go into an in-depth
analysis of disaster relief campaigns, long term development campaigns and
human rights campaigns. Cases range from the response to the Haiti earthquake
in 2010 by the Emergency Appeals Alliance, to campaigns by CARE and Save
the Children. Methodologically, the project entails both a focus on textual
analysis (scrutinizing the campaigns in word and image) and production analysis
(assessing institutionalized production and circulation of these campaigns). For
this the notion of ‘conjunctures’ will be employed, a term used by Chouliaraki
and Fairclough to point to ‘relatively durable assemblies of people, materials,
technologies and therefore practices (in their aspect as relative permanencies)
around specific social projects in the widest sense of the term’.8 Conjunctures,
in other words refer to those constellations in which different social actors, both
human, institutional and material gather around a certain theme or event — in
which it is important to note that ‘the technologies and materials of production
range from physical (…) to symbolic resources.’9
   Common humanity (what the human is), universalism (claims stemming
from this), cosmopolitanism (framing these claims in terms of citizenship) and
globalization (the historical context under which this becomes important) set
the theoretical stage for this dissertation. Around these themes, academia seems
as divided as the world beyond. While Judith Butler for instance states that
arguing with the notion of a ‘common human vulnerability’ is ‘foolish, if not
dangerous’,10 Roland Barthes asserts that the ‘myth of the human “condition”
rests on a very old mystification’.11 Particularly in times of societal instability
concerning the notions of globalization, migration and cosmopolitanism, these
questions are brought to the fore once more. In this sense, addressing the simple-
hearted question ‘What brings us together?’ means to address how these urgent
issues are constructed in the arenas of popular culture, journalism and digital
media — the sides that set the parameters for humanitarian campaigns.




7
   Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 24.
8
   Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough, Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical
Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 22.
9
  Ibidem, p. 23.
10
   Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p.
31.
11
   Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 101.

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