PSO and Wageningen University brought together actors in the humanitarian aid delivery in a panel focusing on livelihood information and responses. The panel was well balanced in terms of the variety of actors and continents/situations. Two presen…

At the recent WCHS, a panel on listening to those affected by aid efforts fell under the “innovations” category. But listening to those whom we are intending to help shouldn’t be seen as an innovation—it should be standard practice. This is what p…

This is my first experience with a large-scale academic conference. Two and a half days – over 400 people, 4 panel sessions per day, up to 9 panels per session to choose from, up to 5 papers per panel. The Second World Conference on Humanitarian S…

Observation: Most of the participants are whiteInference: it is difficult to get visas to the USA, and much of the humanitarian thinking is occurring in the north and westObservation: Most of the panel discussions are about the aid systemInfe…

Aid workers are a beautiful subject for anthropology: they mediate ideas about aid and development and they are the frontline folks that translate programmes into reality. Two books were recently published about them. Anne Meike Fechter and Heathe…

The first day of the conference has left me with a bunch of ideas to write about. Do I want to write about the new buzz for evidence in humanitarianism? Or what about the use of images in the humanitarian field and how we react to suffering? One c…

Many years ago, I used to be involved in a network of people studying the Philippines. We had conferences every two years, and over the years we developed quite a strong network. When I moved into the study of humanitarian aid, disasters and confl…

Humanitarian studies is receiving increased attention; this is already the second World Conference dedicated to humanitarian studies. Perhaps this is related to the common knowledge that emergencies are on the rise.1 The last couple of years saw e…

I wonder if, at a conference dedicated to humanitarianism, there may be any sense of alarm about how the term is being employed these days. In Libya for example, a great many civilians have recently lost their lives or endured terrible suffering b…

As we prepared a joint paper for the upcoming conference, ECB’s Matt Bannerman, and CDAC’s Rachel Hougton and I spent some time talking. We had each participated in inter-organisational collaborations that had drifted from informal relational enti…