Professor Lee Edwards

This course is available on the MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and Fudan), MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and UCT), MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and USC), MSc in Media, Communication and Development and MSc in Strategic Communications. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Today more than ever, images and narratives of vulnerable people in zones of poverty, disaster, violence and conflict routinely populate our everyday lives. They are produced by a wide range of organisations and individuals, and appear on a wide range of platforms, including NGO websites, news networks, social media and celebrity advocacy. In this course, we explore the changing practices of humanitarian communication in the 21st century by addressing questions such as: What are the histories of humanitarian communication? How is it changing today and why? What are the tensions and dilemmas that organizations face as they struggle to communicate the plight of distant others? What kind of politics of visibility and voice is played out in humanitarian communication? What are the ideological and ethical positions informing and informed by the digital narratives and spectacles of vulnerable others - and how do these change when ‘others’ speak for themselves? And finally, what are the challenges of 21st century humanitarian communication and can we do it better?

To explore these issues, students will debate the theoretical principles and empirical realities of humanitarian communication, its contemporary power and moralising force, and the tensions and complexities that underpin its practices and effects.

30 hours of seminars in the LT.

This course is delivered though an in-person, 3-hour weekly seminar in Lent Term. The term includes a reading week in Week 6.

All students are expected to complete advance reading, prepare reading-based seminar presentations, and submit one essay of 1500 words in the LT.

• Adichie, C. N. 2014. We Should All Be Feminists. New York: Vintage.
• Amin, S. 2011. Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure. London: Pambazuka Press.
• Boltanski, L. 1999. Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 
• Barnett, M. 2020. Humanitarianism and human rights: A world of differences? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Barnett,M.  2011. Empire of humanity: a history of humanitarianism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
• Bernal, V. and Grewal, I. 2014. Theorizing NGOs: states, feminisms, and neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Butler, J. 2006. Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso.
• Chouliaraki, L. 2012. The Ironic Spectator. Cambridge: Polity. 
• Chouliaraki, L. and Vestergaard, A. (Eds) 2022. The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication. New York: Routledge.
• Kapoor, I. (2013). Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity. Routledge.
• Mignolo, W. 2000. Local histories/global designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Seu,I.B. and Orgad, S. (eds). 2017. Caring in crisis?: Humanitarianism, the public and NGOs. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Silverstone, R. 2007. Media and morality: On the rise of the mediapolis. Pp, 136-161. Cambridge: Polity.
• Sontag, S. 2003. Regarding the pain of others. London: Penguin.

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the ST.