Former Visiting Assistant Professor Sara Lahti Thiam will be presenting on a chapter she completed while at CWRU recently published in “Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification and Objectification.” The virtual event is on Monday, March 1, 2021, from 12-2 pm, and open to the community. Register by February 27 to receive the Zoom link:
https://forms.gle/NcsZDKjo7ZYXwRRT6.
In addition to Dr. Lahti Thiam, the session will feature short presentations by the collection’s editors (Kristen Cheney and Aviva Sinervo) and other authors (including Drew Anderson, Estella Carpi, Caroline E. Compretta, Karishma Desai, and Chiara Diana), followed by Q&A and discussion.
“Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention” explores how humanitarian interventions for children in difficult circumstances engage in affective commodification of disadvantaged childhoods. The chapters consider how transnational charitable industries are created and mobilized around childhood need—highlighting children in situations of war and poverty, and with indeterminate access to health and education—to redirect global resource flows and sentiments in order to address concerns of child suffering. The authors discuss examples from around the world to show how, as much as these processes can help achieve the goals of aid organizations, such practices can also perpetuate the conditions that organizations seek to alleviate and thereby endanger the very children they intend to help.