1. Chasing Health and Life-threatening Emergencies: A Foucaultian Analysis of Canadian Red Cross Humanitarianism.
- Author
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Friesen, Constance
- Subjects
- *
HUMANITARIANISM , *MEDICAL emergencies , *PUBLIC health - Abstract
While humanitarianism has been called a discourse and accused of covering the corrosive effects of an unfair global order, few scholars have examined how such a discourse might function within the textual or live operations of a humanitarian organization. This paper reports on part one of a three-part Foucaultian analysis of the Canadian Red Cross (CRC) website that investigates how the website leads its viewers to think about what it means to be humanitarian. This first study asks: how is the problem, to which CRC international humanitarianism responds, constructed? The paper argues that the CRC website constructs health and life-threatening emergencies as the most important international problem facing caring humanitarians. It further argues that a health-focused, life-saving discourse privileges certain kinds of knowledges and practices, which fit handily into a global political order and systematically favour wealthy states. While the CRC's problem construction has productive effects--the most obvious one being that the organization does indeed saves lives--it dangerously simplifies and decontextualizes the situation of the world's most disadvantaged. In posing humanitarianism as a response to health and life-threatening emergencies, the CRC website limits ways of imagining the wealthy world's relationship with, and responsibility to, the world's most disadvantaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011