Darryl Stellmach

University of Tasmania · School of Social Sciences

This paper assesses the influence of the humanitarian innovation agenda on the aid sector, particularly medical humanitarian actors’ increasing reliance on digital technologies. Pressure to innovate arises from the belief that technological advancements can save lives, leading to the exploration of new technologies in humanitarian contexts. However...

Diarrhoeal diseases are associated with high morbidity and mortality, especially in children less than five years of age in many low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). This cross-sectional convergence mixed-method study explored water, sanitation and hygiene challenges as important contributors to childhood diarrhoea in rural Tanzania. The study...

Background The importance of integrating the social sciences in epidemic preparedness and response has become a common feature of infectious disease policy and practice debates. However to date, this integration remains inadequate, fragmented and under-funded, with limited reach and small initial investments. Based on data collected prior to the CO...

Background The global food system is not delivering affordable, healthy, diverse diets, which are needed to address malnutrition in all its forms for sustainable development. This will require policy change across the economic sectors that govern food systems, including agriculture, trade, finance, commerce and industry – a goal that has been beset...

This report was commissioned by Anthrologica for the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform (SSHAP). It provides an independent assessment of the work carried out by the Platform in providing remote social science support to the 2018-2020 Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is intended to demonstrate the successes and ch...

This short reflection considers how humanitarian workers conceptualize and practice “the field” as a site of action. Through the use of narrative ethnography, and drawing on comparisons with the practice of academic anthropology, it attempts to draw out disciplinary assumptions that govern how and where humanitarian action is undertaken. It demonst...

A healthy, sustainable and safe food system: examining the perceptions and role of the Australian policy actor using a Delphi survey - CORRIGENDUM - Sinead Boylan, Emma Sainsbury, Anne-Marie Thow, Christopher Degeling, Luke Craven, Darryl Stellmach, Timothy P Gill, Ying Zhang

This book, a culmination of Alex de Waal's roughly 35 years' study of famine, updates and extends arguments made in his previous works. De Waal's central thesis is that famine is anthropogenic (thus preventable) and therefore, when it occurs, a crime and an atrocity. While famine-as-atrocity is not explicitly codified in international law, the auth...

Objective There is an urgent need to identify and develop cross-sectoral policies which promote and support a healthy, safe and sustainable food system. To help shape the political agenda, a critical first step is a shared definition of such a system among policy makers across relevant sectors. The aim of the present study was to determine how Aust...

Changes in legislation have affected supply routes of new psychoactive substances such as synthetic cannabinoids with evidence of supply over the darknet. We identified darknet drug markets using an index database and Tor Browser to access markets. We identified SC in product listings using a custom-programmed script. We collected data at bimonthly...

Experts from 17 countries across 6 continents representing practitioners, researchers, policy makers and community development workers gathered at the University of Sydney to communicate priority areas in nutritional and environmental health for current food systems. The following statement is intended for the audience of the One Health Eco-Health...

Recent outbreaks of Ebola virus disease (2013–2016) and Zika virus (2015–2016) bring renewed recognition of the need to understand social pathways of disease transmission and barriers to care. Social scientists, anthropologists in particular, have been recognised as important players in disease outbreak response because of their ability to assess s...

Despite broadly shared interest in the welfare of ‘precarious lives’, medical anthropology and medical humanitarianism are too often in tension. In this survey, we sketch a history of the two disciplines, then track three major patterns through which anthropologists approach the analysis of medical humanitarian efforts. Our three patterns frame med...

The questions that underlie the anthropological study of humanitarianism—fundamental questions about our moral and political stance towards human life—overlap considerably with the central preoccupations of the Anthropocene debate—which asks what future forms life and politics will take on this planet. This short reflection hopes to encourage discu...

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c81d8b4a-4e73-4bbb-b66f-7c84885ab9b8 This thesis in anthropology investigates how emergency is socially constituted as a named and actionable entity. Specifically, it asks how human values and techno-scientific practices contribute to the constitution of emergency in the context of medical humanitarian interventio...

http://discardstudies.com/discard-studies-compendium/#Cottageindustrial

Humanitarian action has attracted increased anthropological interest in the past decade. Life in Crisis is a significant addition to this literature: the first book-length ethnographic monograph of a medical humanitarian non-governmental organization. It is the product of nearly ten years’ reflection on the medical aid group Médecins Sans Frontière...

In 2010, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) investigated reports of high mortality in young children in Zamfara State, Nigeria, leading to confirmation of villages with widespread acute severe lead poisoning. In a retrospective analysis, we aimed to determine venous blood lead level (VBLL) thresholds and risk factors for encephalopathy using MSF progra...

The humanitarian gesture, broadly construed, is a voluntary, often amateur, expression of human decency and solidarity in the face of suffering. It starts from the assumption of shared, universal humanity. This by extension insists that—when confronted with the immediacy of human suffering—ordinary citizens and people in positions of power have bot...