Luciana Marioara Jinga, Universités d’Angers, Bretagne Sud, Le Mans

Venue: Angers
Time: 12.-13.06.2019
Proposals by 30.12.2018

In 2017, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) published the second edition of its guide „Women, Girls, Boys and Men. Different Needs — Equal Opportunities: Gender Handbook in Humanitarian Action“ (2017), explaining the necessary gender approach in all humanitarian response, showing that the two fields are closer than never and marking the efforts made in this direction for the last two decades. Traditionally, while referring to gender, the history of humanitarian aid traditionally privileged the image of women as victims. The newest scholarship is breaking with this pattern. In a first time, research recuperates the hidden stories of women in the humanitarian, and the contributions of Linda Mahood and Tarah Brookfield mark an important step in this direction.

In a second time, historians, but also political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, are willing to explore the humanitarian aid through the gender lens. Their effort takes looking into how socially constructed practices dictated the assignment of specific roles, hierarchies, responsibilities and expectations to men and women working in the humanitarian effort, but also how structural unequal gender roles present on the field, among the beneficiaries, undermined or even completely compromised humanitarian actions. Recent academic encounters (Gender & Humanitarianism. (Dis-)Empowering Women and Men in the 20th Century, 2017, Gendering Humanitarian Knowledge, 2018, L’humanitaire: nouveau champ de recherche pour l’histoire de l’Europe, 2018) and … read more and source (Web).