The film shows archival footage of Farmer, Jim Yong Kim and others testifying before global health experts who make offensive statements implying that poor people in Africa are ignorant and not deserving of quality healthcare. In the film, Farmer argues that “optimism is a moral choice” and that we cannot be satisfied with mediocrity.
Category: Picturing Humanitarian Healthcare
From Eh to Z(ambia) – Reflections of Canadian’s First Time in the Field
Photo by Gautham Krishnaraj in Kapiri Mposhi, Zambia Gautham Krishnaraj is a 2017–2018 Aga Khan Foundation Canada International Youth Fellow, 2016–2017 RBC Students Leading Change Scholar, and recent MSc Global Health Graduate (McMaster University). He currently resides in Mombasa, Kenya…
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Of Textbooks and Well-Buried Bones – Sonya de Laat
Of Textbooks and Well-Buried Bones: Humanitarianism, human rights and the unintended settlers of the twenty-first century (Or, The twenty-first century’s unintended settlers and access to community) by Sonya de Laat Featured Image: Hannah Mintek At the end of March,…
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On captions
Susan Sontag, in explaining the way a single photograph can be used to support any number of points of view, stated that "all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions" (2003: 10).
Critical history of humanitarian photography on display
From 23-24 May, 2016, as part of the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, an exhibition that takes a critical historical approach to looking at humanitarian photography. This exhibit is part of the ODI-HPG 'Global history of modern humanitarian action’ project.…
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The Humanitarian Visual Landscape of 2015
by Sonya de Laat In this article that explores two themes that dominated the humanitarian visual landscape of 2015, the author invites readers to turn attention away from photographic content or form, and consider instead the medium of photography, the technology itself, as essentially and inherently shocking.
Pandemic Heroes: Saving Humankind on the Big Screen
by Christos Lynteris The depiction of the epidemiologist as a culture hero on the big screen comes to provide a tangible form to the exceptionality of epidemics, unburdening them from the culpabilities of the past and delivering them to the urgency of a suspended future.
From ‘suffering others’ to ‘aspiring mothers’: the contemporary image world of global maternal health campaigns
Maternal mortality was once described as the neglected tragedy of global health. Though it was estimated in the 1980s that nearly half a million women died each year from pregnancy and birth related causes – 99% of them in the global south – little attention was paid and little progress was made for many years. Recently, however, the problem of maternal mortality has become somewhat of a cause célèbre attracting the attention of world leaders, billionaire philanthropists, celebrity journalists, and filmmakers.
Two Tweets, Two Different Takes on People
by Sonya de Laat The Tweets: UN Refugee Agency @Refugees Refugees. Ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Share Tahir's story this #WRD pic.twitter.com/aOFOjAFPPc Maptia @Maptia The Dani still wear penis sheaths, but they also keep their savings in banks: http://bit.ly/1e62clk by…
The Unwelcome Return of Development Porn
For 35 years now, there has been a raging debate within international NGO circles around the use of images of starving black children in fundraising materials. Guidelines and codes of conduct adopted in several countries nearly a decade ago affirmed that all future communications by international development NGOs must be based on core values of human dignity, respect and truthfulness. Despite this, recent years have witnessed NGOs that should know better reverting to type, calling up disaster images from the 1970s in a desperate attempt to increase their organizational income, whatever the cost. A battle which we thought had been won many years ago clearly needs to be fought afresh in each new generation.
Humanitarian Health Ethics 