Contribute

We encourage humanitarian healthcare workers, academics, professional photographers, visual artists, communications specialists and others with an interest to contribute images, commentary or personal reflections to the Picturing Humanitarian Healthcare Blog.  

The goal of the Blog is to mediate perspectives and dialogue between a wide variety of stakeholders on visual representations of humanitarian healthcare.

We invite commentary on images in the public domain (e.g., NGO campaigns), and reflections on personally produced images (e.g., photographs you made while in the field) or reflections on the politics of producing images in disaster and other humanitarian crisis settings.

Submissions might:

• Depict the broad context of humanitarian healthcare crises
• Tell a personal story
• Speak to lived and regional health realities
• Speak to the value and/or tensions of trans-national care
• Show relations between healthcare providers and their patients and/or environment
• Be understood as an act of witnessing
• Make visible the challenge of making images in/of/for humanitarian healthcare context
• Make visible the interconnection between humanitarian healthcare and broader political economic, commercial, and social structures
• Focus on a particular moment or mood
• Disrupt stereotypes about a place, a group, or a relation
• Engage the difficulty of making representations
• Engage the social, political, importance of image-making

All submissions will be reviewed by the Picturing Humanitarian Ethics curators to ensure the appropriateness of the content for our intentions of dialogue and exchange.

Comments in response to existing Blog posts (using the Leave a Reply feature or by submission to the curators at humethnet@gmail.com) are invited and encouraged. They will be posted following a light editorial review by the curators.

Curatorial Policy

• Submissions are published in a blog format, with the most recent accepted submission posted at the top. Co-curators, Sonya de Laat and Elysée Nouvet, both review all submissions prior to being uploaded.
• The curators are looking for critical engagement with the ethical nature of images that picture humanitarian healthcare: issues of consent, politics of representation, context of photographic event, way in which the image was originally used (or intended to be used), potential or actual social, political or economic impact, etc.
• There is a suggested 750-word limit for Blog submissions and a 250-word limit for comments to existing posts; keep in mind, this is just a suggestion. We reserve the right to negotiate length with contributors. Deciding factors will include, but are not limited to, length in relation to relevant content.
• We welcome responses to all Blog contributions on the Picturing Humanitarian Healthcare site.  Responses will be moderated prior to posting.
• With respect to moderation, the curators wish to prevent spam, phishing, abusive comments and personal attacks. The goal is to encourage peer discussion with emphasis on criticism supported by evidence. Moderation by the curators will be exercised with a light touch; the hope is to foster discussion, not constrain it.
• If a contribution includes an image or set of images for which the contributor is not the author, it is the contributor’s responsibility to ensure that the image(s) they wish to discuss can be re-posted without copyright violations (e.g., in the public domain), or to secure such permissions prior to posting.
• We encourage ‘fair use’ consideration of copyright: use of material for commentary, and non-commercial creative purposes, and cite references. (Similar to Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license.)

Please contact one of the Picturing Humanitarian Healthcare co-curators, Sonya de Laat and Elysée Nouvet, at humethnet@gmail.com for more details about contributing, or about the site in general.