Colonial heritage and restitution: a round table discussion among museum professionals

Political Culture and National Identit

Picturing the nation : The Celtic periphery as discursive other in the archaeological displays of the museum of Scotland

Using the archaeological displays at the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, this paper examines the exhibition as a site of identity creation through the negotiations between categories of same and Other. Through an analysis of the poetics of display, the paper argues that the exhibition constructs a particular relationship between the Celtic Fringe and Scottish National identity that draws upon the historical discourses of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland as a place and a time \u27apart\u27. This will be shown to have implications for the display of archaeological material in museums but also for contemporary understandings of Scottish National identity. <br /

Child Sponsorship as Development Education in the Northern Classroom

This chapter explores the ethical dilemmas, and potential harm done when child sponsorship NGOs market sponsorship to children in school settings. Arguing that child sponsorship functions as a form of development education in the northern classroom, this chapter points to the potential for CS marketing strategies to infantalise and demean the poor, through a well-intentioned lens of paternalism. The chapter calls for greater commitment to global citizenship education in the crowded curriculum of secondary education and provides key questions (after Andreotti, 2012) for NGO marketing staff to consider in their public communication

Post-humanitarianism: humanitarian communication beyond a politics of pity

This article offers a trajectory of humanitarian communication, which suggests a clear, though not linear, move from emotion-oriented to post-emotional styles of appealing. Drawing on empirical examples, the article demonstrates that the humanitarian sensibility that arises out of these emerging styles breaks with pity and privileges a short-term and low-intensity form of agency, which is no longer inspired by an intellectual agenda but momentarily engages us in practices of playful consumerism. Whereas this move to the post-emotional should be seen as a reaction to a much-criticized articulation between politics and humanitarianism, which relied on ‘universal’ morality and grand emotion, it is also a response to the intensely mediatized global market in which humanitarian agencies operate today. The article concludes by reflecting on the political and ethical ambivalence at the heart of this new style of humanitarian communication, which offers both the tentative promise of new practices of altruism and the threat of cultural narcissism

‘The things that we have to do’: Ethics and instrumentality in humanitarian communication

This study critically reflects on a schism evident in debates surrounding 'humanitarian communication'. On one hand, it is approached as embodying an ideal of ethical practice. On the other, ideal humanitarianism is deployed as the grounds for a critique, whereby 'humanitarian practice' is seen as compromised by exigencies and political-economic influence. Drawing on the testimony of humanitarian communication practitioners within major international agencies, we argue this also reflects a felt tension within the field, where practitioners are very aware of the practical constraints and material influences to which they are subject. In both cases, however, an assumed opposition between the 'practical' and the 'ethical' tends to position 'humanitarian ethics' as an ahistorical ideal that stands apart from, and acts as a check on, instrumental action. This paper argues that a more historically grounded analysis suggests a more complex interrelationship between ethical and instrumental concerns. © The Author(s) 2012

‘Doing denial’: audience reaction to human rights appeals

Whilst many hypotheses have been formulated on why audiences remain passive in response to distant suffering, very little empirical research has been carried out to verify these hypotheses. This article discusses audience denial in response to information about human rights abuses1, paying attention to both content and strategies used in accounts of denial, i.e. what these accounts say and by which means they effectively neutralize appeals for action. Three repertoires are identified as specific targets for neutralization: (1) The message itself (‘the medium is the message’); (2) Campaigners and, in particular, Amnesty International (’shoot the messenger’); (3) The action recommended in the appeal (‘babies and bathwater’). These repertoires are analysed in terms of the discursive techniques – e.g. argumentation, rhetorical and semantic moves and speech acts – used to neutralize the moral claims made by Amnesty International’s appeals. The article suggests that audience denial is an operation of power and production of knowledge in so far as it plays a role in sustaining and colluding with more systemic and official operations of passivity and denial. The normative implication of audiences’ justifications for their passivity is illustrated in their banal, everyday contribution to a morality of unresponsiveness. The discussion aims to contribute to current debates on the ‘Politics of Pity’, social responsibility and distant suffering. It also contributes to psychological work on pro-social behaviour and, in particular, to research on audiences’ responses to humanitarian appeals and mediation in general