Week 5. Disaster porn and the complexity of “aid”

Slide presentation

Tuesday, February 21 [PDF]

Readings

• Timothy Recuber, “Disaster Porn!”, Contexts, 12(2), 28–33. (2013)
• Linda Polman, The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? (2010). Let’s read the Introduction (PDF pages 10-18), and the Afterword (PDF pages 145-150). Then check out the glossary, titled “Aidspeak” (PDF pages 151-168). If you have time, let’s also read chapter 1, “Goma: A “Total Ethical Disaster” (PDF pages 19-36).
• Pooja Rangan, “Bare Liveness: The Eyewitness to Catastrophe in the Age of Humanitarian Emergency”, from Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary, 2017. This one is a bit long, and it is a bit tough in some sections, but I also think there is a lot that you can get out of it. Try your best, focus on what you understand, and maybe skip over the sections that get too deep into citing lots of difficult academic references.
• (Optional.) Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2004. This is a hugely influential book about images, photography, visual culture, violence, and empathy. Unfortunately it’s just too much for us to get to. I’ll try to bring some ideas from the book into our discussion, and we’ll revisit these ideas in week 11 on “Virtual Empathy & Community.”

Other texts

• Jeff Jardine, “Dust Bowl Part IV: Symbol of an Era”, The Modesto Bee, September 17, 2008. This short newspaper article discusses the image that I selected to represent this week: the famous Dorothea Lange photo of Florence Owens Thompson.

Guests

On Thursday, February 23 we were visited by Kate Hutton of the City of Seattle, and Dr Kate Hutton, retired seismologist from CalTech and section manager of the National Traffic Service for Southern California.