Funding awarded (£4,500) for Beyond Humanitarian 'Emergencies'

CDCS funding was awarded for a collaborative, interdisciplinary project that explores whether the reporting of humanitarian issues is still dominated by the “emergency imaginary”. Craig Calhoun famously argued that Western journalists and aid workers collectively reproduced an “emergency imaginary” via their media coverage of humanitarian crises and related fundraising appeals. He argued that this interpretative frame had spread internationally, to become the main way of understanding and organising humanitarian responses in the world.

Two decades after Calhoun first wrote about it, the emergency imaginary is still widely regarded as the “master frame” of humanitarianism. But the supposed global dominance of this model within media coverage has never been the subject of systematic and largescale investigation. So, this project asked:

a/ to what extent the emergency imaginary dominated Anglophone coverage of humanitarian issues over a ten-year period
b/ which dimensions of Calhoun’s interpretative frame were involved
c/ how these dimensions appeared alongside other forms of discourse in the world

The PI for this project is Kate Wright (Edinburgh), who also led on corpus analysis. Her first co-author, Dani-Madrid Morales (Sheffield) built the 10-year corpus, with the assistance of Andrew Jones (Leicester), and led analysis using a k-means algorithm and PCA. The second co-author, Christopher Barrie (Edinburgh) led on word embedding. Please note: the project had to be paused temporarily during CV19.