Institute for Ethics, History, and the Humanities (University of Geneva); Institute of Gender Studies (University of Geneva); Spanish Scientific Council IMF (Barcelona) (Web)

Time: 20.-21.04.2018
Venue: Geneva
Abstract Submission: 31.12.2017

Present humanitarian crises have increasingly led scholars to look back at the past in order to provide a long-term history of disaster relief work that would help us to track the empirical knowledge accumulated during wars, famines, epidemics and other natural disasters. Although this empirical knowledge produced by humanitarian workers in the field of operations is mainly rooted in medical practices concerning hygiene, epidemiology, psychiatry, nursing or nutrition, it extends historically beyond the borders of what we understand today as “humanitarian medicine” (Brauman, 1996).

In order to epistemologically approach all those relief practices as a whole body, including socio-cultural skills and competences that remain at the margins of science, the organizers propose to use the term humanitarian knowledge in this conference, in accordance with recent studies on the history of science (Renn, 2016), the history of knowledge (Burke, 2016), and post-colonialist studies (Purtschert and Fischer-Tiné, 2015). They invite scholars to think about this notion of humanitarian knowledge in a multidisciplinary way, by combining perspectives such as gender history, the histories of emotions and the body, … read more and source (Web).