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.

Introduction: Humanitarian Communication in the 21st Century  PART I: DOMAINS  1. Disaster Aid as a Domain of Media and Humanitarian Politics  2. Development and its Narratives  3. Human Rights, Culture and Media  4. Media and Compassion in Digital War  PART II: METHODS  5. The Audience of Humanitarian Communication  6. Text-analytical Approaches to Humanitarian Communication  7. Production-centered Approaches to Humanitarian Communication  8. Ethnography in Humanitarian Communication: Descending into the Lifeworlds of Witnessing and Wounded Subjects  PART III: ISSUES  Politics  9. The Logic of Projects in Humanitarian Relief  10. Micro-mapping: Digital Humanitarianism and the Politics of Material Participation in Disaster Relief  11. Technocolonialism: Digital Innovation and Data Practices in the Humanitarian Response to Refugee Crises  12. The Politics of Humanitarian Journalism  13. Conflicted Witnesses: Journalists and the Humanitarian Imaginary  14. Human Rights Protests and Mediated Violence  Economy  15. Celebrity Advocacy  16. Brand Aid: Humanitarianism in Corporate Communication  17. Humanitarianism in the African Luxury Designer Market  18. Corporate Social Responsibility and the Humanitarian Civic Imaginary  19. Volunteer Tourism as Humanitarian Communication  20. Humanitarianism and Microfinance  Histories and Futures  21. Humanitarian Imagery: Historical registers in the representation of atrocity  22. Photography and Humanitarian Intervention: The Early Years, 1850s–1914  23. MSF: Silence heals. From the Cold War to the War on Terror  24. How Do We Arm the Other Eleven? Humanitarianism, Commodities and Jobs  25. Post-humanitarianism: Solidarity beyond the Politics of Pity  26. Data Witnessing: Attending to Injustice with Data in Amnesty International’s Decoders Project