Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication (Routledge International Handbooks)

The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to research within the academic sub-field of humanitarian communication. It is broadly focused on communication which presents human vulnerability as a cause for public concern and encompasses communication with respect to humanitarian aid and development as well as human rights and ‘humanitarian’ wars. Recent years have seen the expansion of critical scholarship on humanitarian communication across a range of academic fields, sharing a recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of humanitarianism as an agent of transnational power, global governance and cosmopolitan solidarity. The Handbook brings into dialogue these diverse fields, theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches as well as the public debates that lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism. It consolidates existing knowledge and maps out this emerging field as an important site of interdisciplinary knowledge production on media, communication and humanitarianism. The Handbook is not simply as a collection of texts sharing a similar theme. It is a coherent intellectual contribution which systematizes existing critical scholarship in terms of Domains, Methods and Issues and sets an agenda of emerging and evolving research priorities in the field. Including twenty-five chapters written by international scholars, who have contributed to laying the foundation of this emerging field, this volume provides an essential guide to the key ideas, issues, concepts and debates of humanitarian communication. About the Author Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published extensively on distant suffering as a problem of communication and is the author or editor of seven volumes, including Discourse in Late Modernity (1999), The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006; 2011), The Soft Power of War (ed, 2008) and The Ironic Spectator (2013). Anne Vestergaard is Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School. Her research revolves around mainstream discourses of morality, pursued in two strands of research, one concerning humanitarian communication, the other concerning CSR communication. Vestergaard’s work is published in international journals such as Business & Society, Journal of Business Ethics and Critical Discourse Studies. In addition, Vestergaard is editor of Civic Engagement and Social Media. Political Participation Beyond Protest (with Julie Uldam, 2015).