• Home
  • About
  • News & Events
  • Archive
    • Fall 2020: DECENTERING MIGRATION AND DECOLONIZING HUMANITARIANISM
    • Winter 2021: COMPARATIVE ​HUMANITARIANISMS
  • People
  • Contact
HUMANITARIANISMS
  • Home
  • About
  • News & Events
  • Archive
    • Fall 2020: DECENTERING MIGRATION AND DECOLONIZING HUMANITARIANISM
    • Winter 2021: COMPARATIVE ​HUMANITARIANISMS
  • People
  • Contact

NEWS & EVENT REGISTRATION


Register for Newsletter
Posted April 12, 2021
COMING SOON: WEBINAR W/ DEAN SPADE, "MUTAL AID: RADICAL CARE IN CRISIS CONDITIONS" & CRISTIAN CAPOTESCU, "ECHOES OF THE 'NEW SOVIET MAN': HUMANITY AND THE ETHICS OF GIVING IN LATE SOCIALISM"
Webinar | Thursday, April 22, 2021 | 3:30–4:45 PM PDT

Registration
Picture
EVENT: In our first spring series, Dean Spade (Seattle University) and Cristian Capotescu (University of Washington) discuss mutual aid today and its analog in the socialist period. Dean Spade shows that humanitarianism, saviorism, and charity have been extensively critiqued as logics that undergird and legitimize war, colonialism, racialized-gendered control, and extraction. How do people organizing immediate survival support for each other in the face of crisis work together to resist these methods and build practices of solidarity and collective self-determination? Cristian Capotescu, in turn, investigates how, in the late 1980s, for many citizens of the former socialist bloc, practicing and living socialism involved helping the less fortunate, the sick, and the poor through acts of giving. Such volunteer work and private assistance often invoked moral claims of a better life based on an ethics of shared suffering, dependency, and radical equality. This talk traces how socialist giving opened the possibility for ordinary people to enact notions of shared humanity in alternative ways that frequently eluded capitalist, Western modernity.

FEATURING: Dean Spade is Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law and author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso, 2020). Cristian Capotescu is the Postdoctoral Scholar for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Humanitarianisms at the University of Washington. He completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of Michigan in 2020 and is currently working on his first book, Disasters and Solidarities: The Transnational Remaking of Crisis Socialism.

April 2021
Posted March 21, 2021
ANNOUNCING NEW SPRING QUARTER 2021 SAWYER SEMINAR PROGRAM
​Spring Quarter 2021 Series | Program

DOWNLOAD Flyer
Picture
EVENT: Explore our Mellon Sawyer Humanitarianisms spring quarter program featuring our third thematic cluster Rethinking the Human.  We look forward to seeing you!

SPRING QUARTER 2021 PROGRAM:

Thursday, April 1, 2021, 03:30-04:45 PM PDT
Sinan Antoon (New York University), “Rescuing the Dead.” Register here.

​April 22, 2021, 3:30 PM–4:45 PM PDT
Dean Spade (Seattle University), “Mutual Aid: Radical Care in Crisis Conditions” & Cristian Capotescu (University of Washington), “Echoes of the ‘New Soviet Man’: Humanity and the Ethics of Giving in Late Socialism.” Register here.


May 6, 2021, 3:30 PM–4:45 PM PDT
Juno Salazar Parreñas (Cornell University), “Empathy Beyond the Human in an Era of Inhumanity" & Nermeen Mouftah (Butler University), “Sacrificial Skins: The Value of Pakistan’s Eid al-Azha Animal Hide Collection.” Register here.
​
Posted March 16, 2021​
WEBINAR WITH SINAN ANTOON, "RESCUING THE DEAD"
Webinar | Thursday, April 1, 2021 | 3:30–4:45 PM PDT

Registration
Download flyer
Picture
Picture
EVENT: Material and discursive resources and energies are dedicated (insufficiently and unequally) to rescue the living from harm, and to tend to their wounds. But what of the dead? What can we, the living, learn from the rituals and traditions of tending to the dead and to their wounds? Beyond the corporeal, encounters with the ghosts and memories of the dead raise crucial political questions about the ways in which humans inhabit this world. Al-Ma’arri, cautioned us a millennium ago to “tread gently, for the soil of this earth is made of these corpses.” This talk will summon al-Ma’arri’s ghost, among others, to address these questions.

FEATURING: Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi-born poet, novelist, and scholar. He has published two collections of poetry and four novels. His most recent work is The Book of Collateral Damage (Yale University Press, 2019). His prize-winning translations
include In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish (Archipelago, 2011). Antoon’s scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (Palgrave, 2014). His op-eds have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times and many pan-Arab newspapers. He is co-founder and
co-editor of Jadaliyya and Associate Professor at New York University.
​
Posted March 10, 2021
NOW ONLINE: WEBINAR WITH AMIRA MITTERMAIER & SIENNA CRAIG
Winter Quarter 2021 Series | Webinar Archive

Watch Webinar
Picture
EVENT: In our winter conversation series, Amira Mittermaier and Sienna R. Craig discuss comparative humanitarianisms in Egypt and the Himalayas. Both articulate the need to move away from human-centric, conventional humanitarianisms by bringing to light the Islamic, Tibetan, and Himalayan logics of giving in Egypt, the Himalayas, and the U.S. 
​

March 2021
Posted February 6, 2021​
WEBINAR WITH
BASIT IQBAL, “AMBIVALENCE AND ASKESIS IN ZAATARI REFUGEE CAMP” & CHINA SCHERZ, "SEEKING THE WOUNDS OF THE GIFT: RECIPIENT AGENCY IN CATHOLIC CHARITY AND KIGANDA PATRONAGE"
Webinar | Thursday, February 18, 2021 | 3:30–4:30 PM PST

Download flyer
Picture
Picture
EVENT: Basit Iqbal will speak in “Ambivalence and Askesis in Zaatari Refugee Camp” about the conditions of life of an Islamic pedagogue in Zaatari refugee camp, who distinguished between the registers of divine tribulation and affliction, and between the duties and capacities of the subject. This talk will draw on the anthropology of humanitarianism and literature on political theology in order to understand this ethical project. China Scherz will problematize in “Seeking the Wounds of the Gift: Recipient Agency in Catholic Charity and Kiganda Patronage” the idea that gifts of charity contain hidden dangers for those who receive them. Her lecture will challenge such a reading by exploring instances of beneficiary agency in the context of charitable exchange. These instances of asking, giving, and receiving complicate arguments about charity and humanitarianism which see charitable gifts as inevitably harmful.

FEATURING: Basit Kareem Iqbal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University. He studies displacement, refuge, and theodicy in the wake of the Syrian uprising. China Scherz is Associate Professorof Anthropology at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Uganda (University of Chicago Press, 2014). She specializes in medical anthropology, the anthropology of ethics, and the anthropology of religion.
​

Posted January 5, 2021
NOW ONLINE: WEBINAR WITH ELENA FIDDIAN-QASMIYEH 
Winter Quarter 2021 Series | Webinar Archive

Watch Webinar
Picture
EVENT: In this keynote lecture inaugurating our quarter theme Comparative Humanitarianisms from January 22, 2021, Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh from University College London discusses Middle Eastern refugee responses, including hosting, to the displacement of Syrian refugees since 2011. Her talk offers an overview of the roles played by local host communities, faith-based networks, Southern states including Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, and refugees themselves.
​


February 2021
Posted January 24, 2021​
WEBINAR WITH AMIRA MITTERMAIER, "GOD, HUMANS, AND AN ISLAMIC ETHIC OF CARE" & SIENNA R. CRAIG, "FROM EARTHQUAKES AND EMPOWERMENTS TO PANDEMICS: TIBETAN MEDICAL HUMANITARIANISMS"
Webinar | Thursday, February 4, 2021 | 3:30–4:30 PM PST

Download flyer
Picture
Picture
EVENT: For this webinar, we have invited two guests to speak on the topic of comparative humanitarianisms.
Amira Mittermaier (“God, Humans, and an Islamic Ethics of Care): Caring for those in need is a central pillar of Islam. But caring for is not necessarily the same as caring about. Drawing on fieldwork in informal spaces of giving in post-2011 Egypt, this talk lays out an Islamic ethics of care—one not driven by compassion or pity but centered on divinely prescribed rights and responsibilities.   


Sienna R. Craig (“Himalayan Humanitarianisms: Crisis Response from Earthquakes to Pandemics”): How does “humanitarianism” surface in contexts that are primarily non-biomedical and that emerge from Tibetan Buddhist worldviews? What ideals, materials, and practices shape such encounters? Building on ethnographic research that focuses on Tibetan medical camps in India and Nepal, and incorporating recent events related to Tibetan medical responses to COVID-19 in North America and Asia, Craig considers how local logics of care intersect with a global politics of compassion.
​

FEATURING: Amira Mittermaier is Professor of Anthropology and the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (U. of California Press, 2011) and Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times (U. of California Press, 2019). Sienna R. Craig is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. She is the author most recently of The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives Between Nepal and New York (U. of Washington Press, 2020). 
​

Posted January 15, 2021​
WINTER QUARTER KEYNOTE: "SHIFTING THE GAZE - SOUTHERN-LED HUMANITARIAN RESPONSES TO DISPLACEMENT" BY
ELENA FIDDIAN-QASMIYEH
Webinar | Thursday, January 21, 2021 | 9:30-10:30 am PST

Download flyer
Picture
Picture
EVENT: Displacement is primarily a "Southern" and "South-South" phenomenon, to which Southern actors have historically responded in ways that resist, reject, and provide alternatives to the hegemonic aid regime. In this webinar, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh focuses on responses to Syrian displacement since 2011 and develops a multiscalar analysis of the roles played by Southern states, local host communities, faith-based networks, and refugees themselves. She argues that a focus on  “refugee-refugee humanitarianism” can challenge dominant and exclusionary Northern humanitarianism paradigms of refugee studies.

FEATURING: Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies and Co-Director of the Migration Research Unit at University College London, where she directs the Refuge in a Moving World interdisciplinary research network.








​
Posted January 5, 2021
NOW ONLINE: WEBINAR WITH JESSICA WHYTE & EMMA MEYER
Fall Quarter 2020 Series | Webinar Archive

Watch Webinar
Picture
EVENT: In this webinar from December 4, 2020, our panelists Jessica Whyte and Emma Meyer invite us to rethink the concepts of humanity, humanitarianism, refuge making and law by focusing on the formerly unrecognized arenas and actors of humanitarianism in the Global South. If you missed the live event, you can rewatch the conversation in our webinar archive. Future recordings will be posted approximately two weeks after airing.
​

Posted January 1, 2021
ANNOUNCING NEW WINTER QUARTER 2021 SAWYER SEMINAR PROGRAM
​Winter Quarter 2021 Series | Program

DOWNLOAD Flyer
Picture
EVENT: Our new quarterly program for Winter 2021 is now available! The second cluster of the Sawyer Seminar Comparative Humanitarianisms will bring an excellent group of scholars to our webinar series. We look forward to seeing you at our events soon!

WINTER QUARTER 2021 PROGRAM:

Thursday, January 21, 2021, 9:30-10:30 am PST
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh - Shifting the Gaze: Southern-led Humanitarian Responses to Displacement

Register here.

​February 4, 2021, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM PST
Amira Mittermaier (University of Toronto), “God, Humans, and an Islamic Ethics of Care” & Sienna R. Craig (Dartmouth College), “From Earthquakes and Empowerments to Pandemics: Tibetan Medical Humanitarianisms”
Register here.


February 18, 2021, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM PST
Basit Kareem Iqbal (McMaster University), “Ambivalence and Askesis in Zaatari Refugee Camp” & China Scherz (University of Virginia), “Seeking the Wounds of the Gift:  Recipient Agency in Catholic Charity and Kiganda Patronage”
Register here.
​


January 2021
Picture
Get our Newsletter
Connect with Us:
Contact Us:
HUMANITARIANISMS:
​
MIGRATIONS AND CARE THROUGH THE GLOBAL SOUTH​
© 2021 Mellon Sawyer Seminar Humanitarianisms
  • Home
  • About
  • News & Events
  • Archive
    • Fall 2020: DECENTERING MIGRATION AND DECOLONIZING HUMANITARIANISM
    • Winter 2021: COMPARATIVE ​HUMANITARIANISMS
  • People
  • Contact