#Help
Year: 2023
Type: book
Abstract: Like many other areas of life, humanitarian practice and thinking are being transformed by information and communications technology. Yet the growing digitization of humanitarianism has so far been a little-noticed dimension of global order. It is one on which this book sheds new light. Based on more than seven years of interviews and interdisciplinary research on humanitarian and development professionals’ work within the UN system and elsewhere, #Help shows how global problems and polities are being newly configured, regulated, and addressed through digital interfaces developed or deployed for humanitarian ends. #Help analyzes how populations, maps, and emergencies take shape when given digital form. #Help explores the reorientation of nation-states’ priorities and practices of governing around digital data collection imperatives. #Help illuminates how digital interfaces’ growing prominence in international humanitarian work is sustained and shaped by law and policy, public and private, and the uses and users that are engaged and disqualified in the process. Through this, #Help reveals new vectors of global inequality and new registers of global relation currently taking effect. To understand how major digital platforms are seeking to extend their serviceable lives, and to foreshadow how global order might take shape in the future, it is essential to grasp the perils and possibilities of digital humanitarianism as #Help equips us to do. #Help will transform thinking about what is at stake in the use of digital interfaces in the humanitarian field and about how, where, and for whom we are making the international order of tomorrow.
Author: Fleur Johns
Institution: UNSW Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4321486564