ABSTRACT

The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to research in the academic sub-field of humanitarian communication. It is broadly focused on communication that presents human vulnerability as a cause for public concern and encompasses communication with respect to humanitarian aid and development as well as human rights and "humanitarian" wars.
Recent years have seen the expansion of critical scholarship on humanitarian communication across a range of academic fields, sharing recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of humanitarianism as an agent of transnational power, global governance and cosmopolitan solidarity. The Handbook brings into dialogue these diverse fields, their theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches as well as the public debates that lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism. It consolidates existing knowledge and maps out this emerging field as an important site of interdisciplinary knowledge production on media, communication and humanitarianism.
As such, the Handbook is not simply a collection of texts sharing a similar theme. It is a coherent intellectual contribution which systematizes current critical scholarship in terms of Domains, Methods and Issues and sets an agenda of emerging and evolving research priorities in the field. Consisting of 26 chapters written by international scholars, who have contributed to laying the foundation of the field, this volume provides an essential guide to the key ideas, issues, concepts and debates of humanitarian communication.

chapter |22 pages

Introduction

Humanitarian communication in the 21st century

part I|64 pages

Domains

chapter 1|15 pages

Disaster Aid

chapter 2|15 pages

Development

chapter 3|12 pages

Human Rights

chapter 4|21 pages

Digital War

part III|306 pages

Issues Politics

chapter 10|14 pages

Micromapping

Digital humanitarianism and disaster relief

chapter 11|18 pages

Technocolonialism

Digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian response to refugee crises

chapter 13|15 pages

Forgotten conflicts

Journalists and the humanitarian imaginary

section |98 pages

Economics

section |108 pages

Histories and Futures

chapter 21|23 pages

Humanitarian imagery

Historical registers in the representation of atrocity

chapter 22|22 pages

Photography and humanitarian intervention

The early years, 1850–1914

chapter 23|15 pages

Silence heals

MSF from the Cold War to the war on terror1 1

chapter 25|15 pages

Post-humanitarianism

Solidarity as lifestyle politics

chapter 26|21 pages

Data witnessing

Amnesty International's Decoders project