Research as agitation: Generative activism in the age of resistance

Correction: Research as agitation: Generative activism in the age of resistance

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0000142.].

International humanitarian narratives of disasters, crises, and Indigeneity

Narratives are a means of making sense of disasters and crises. The humanitarian sector communicates stories widely, encompassing representations of peoples and events. Such communications have been critiqued for misrepresenting and/or silencing the root causes of disasters and crises, depoliticising them. What has not been researched is how such communications represent disasters and crises in Indigenous settings. This is important because processes such as colonisation are often at the origin but are typically masked in communications. A narrative analysis of humanitarian communications is employed here to identify and characterise narratives in humanitarian communications involving Indigenous Peoples. Narratives differ based upon how the humanitarians who produce them think that disasters and crises should be governed. The paper concludes that humanitarian communications reflect more about the relationship between the international humanitarian community and its audience than reality, and underlines that narratives mask global processes that link audiences of humanitarian communications with Indigenous Peoples.

Humanitarian inversions: COVID-19 as crisis

COVID-19 is a multi-spectral crisis that has added an acute layer over a panoply of complex emergencies across the world. In the process, it has not only exposed actually-existing emergencies, but also exacerbated them as the global gaze has turned inward. As a crisis, COVID-19 straddles and challenges the boundaries between humanitarianism, development and global health - the frames and categories through which emergencies are so often understood and intervened upon. Reflection on these fundamental categories is, we argue, an important geographical endeavour. Drawing on Geoffrey Bowker's analytical lens of the 'infrastructural inversion', we explore how humanitarianism has been upended by Covid-19 along two axes that are of core concern to geographers: (1) the spatial; and (2) the temporal. We first contextualise current debates on the humanitarian endeavour and its future within recent geographical research. We then set out the complex structure by which COVID-19 has been both imagined and intervened upon as a humanitarian emergency. In so doing, we then pave the way for a deeper empirical analysis of the spatial and temporal inversions that have been brought forth by COVID-19. The paper concludes by examining the conceptual value of the 'inversion' in developing geographical research agendas better attuned to the increasing porosity of humanitarianism, development and global health.