Humanity Journal

The editors of the special dossier on gender and humanitarian issues explain the motivations and main themes of the sequence of essays.

Mimi Sheller returns to sugar and other boycotts in the era of antislavery—with their gendering of consumer action—and how they might help put contemporary Fair Trade movements in historical and political perspective.

Soderlund provides a rhetorical analysis of tropes that pervade contemporary discourses of sex trafficking, relating them to past humanitarian sensibility and a gendered narrative of expose and rescue.

Kerry Bystom examines the celebrated case of Madonna's adoptions to highlight celebrity involvement with African children and how such prominent practices of humanitarian adoption intersect conceptions of gender and family.

The authors provide a close analysis of contemoprary Canadian actress Mia Kirshner's I Live Here project and how it moves ambiguously between building alliances for progressive humanitarianism while also silencing its objects of attention and inserting them in familiar tropes in an era of transnational witnessing.

Taking up campaigns on behalf of Haitians and people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, Martínez explores how gendered notions of rescue and salvation obstruct a better understanding of political organization and agency among those reduced to being victims in key humanitarian representations.

Photographer Greg Constantine presents selections from two sets of his work, one called "Nowhere People" (on contemporary statelessness) and the other called "Nubians in Kenya" (depicting their political situation and everyday life).

The authors provide a commentary on Greg Constantine's photographs.

Tobias Kelly discusses recent works on torture.