Valérie Gorin

• PhD
• Head of Learning - Senior Lecturer and Researcher at University of Geneva

Drawing from ethnographic scholarship on experienced moralities in aid work, this article interrogates the engagement of humanitarian delegates in the International Committee of the Red Cross ( ICRC ) mission during the civil war in Yemen (1962–1970). Working in difficult and remote conditions, the ICRC delegates developed paradoxical relationships...

This special issue explores the evolving history of humanitarian experiences by bridging emotions, senses, and lived realities with broader social and political contexts. It challenges conventional definitions of humanitarianism by reframing it as a ‘cultivated feeling’ and examining its diverse embodiments across history. Contributions analyse how...

By examining Renée-Marguerite Frick-Cramer’s and Marguerite van Berchem’s work in the tracing agencies of the International Committee of the Red Cross, this article seeks to contribute to the development of a history of care involving the production of a form of humanitarian knowledge aimed at caring, at distance, for people who had been separated...

It took a long time for humanitarian action to evolve from an act of activism to a subject of research. This article traces this evolution, while reminding us that “humanitarian studies” are still far from complete. In a subtle way, the author illustrates the role that a review like Humanitarian Alternatives can play in building a bridge between ac...

Since the UNHCR’s movie Clouds over Sidra , filmed in 2015 in the Zaatari refugee camp, the use of Virtual Reality (VR) has increased among humanitarian organisations for raising funds or awareness. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), among others, have relied on 3D and 360-degree images to enhanc...

This afterword revisits the wide range of visual media explored in this edited volume, reflecting on the advantages and limits of the methodologies used as well as on potential perspectives for future research.

This open access collection of essays explores the emotional agency of images in the construction of ‘humanitarian crises’ from the nineteenth century to the present. Using the prism of the histories of emotions and the senses, the chapters examine the pivotal role images have in shaping cultural, social and political reactions to the suffering of...

Introduction to the special issue "Moving away from chidlhood as an icon: an ethical and operational requirement", published in Humanitarian Alternatives

The following conversation explores the emergence of advocacy within the MSF movement. Maria Guevara was Senior Operational Positioning and Advocacy Advisor in the Operational Centre Geneva (OCG) at MSF Switzerland. Marc DuBois was the Head of the Humanitarian Affairs Department in the Operational Centre Amsterdam (OCA) at MSF Holland and the forme...

Focusing on the pivotal period of 1919-23 and the large-scale humanitarian responses in Central and Eastern Europe, this paper discusses the development of advocacy in the movies made by organizations like the ICRC, Save the Children Fund or American Relief Administration. While aid agencies observed and competed with each other for visibility, hum...

Since its surge in 2014, the migrant and refugee crisis has been a major issue for the European community, not only impacting the geopolitical, economic, societal and humanitarian sectors but also challenging media practices, narratives and framings. This special issue investigates journalistic routines, norms and representations of migrants and re...

This article retraces a conversation with Nicolae Schiau – a radio journalist at RTS (the French-speaking Swiss national radio and television broadcaster) – and the face behind Exils. This 'augmented’ reportage followed the journey of six young migrants from the Syrian border to Germany and France. The two editors of this special issue interviewed...

Journal: Twentieth Century Communism

From the first anniversary of the revolution in 1918, 7 November was the date that the peoples and territories of the USSR - as well as many communities outside of the regime - came together in commemoration of the October socialist revolution. This volume brings together authors from across Europe, who explore those commemorations from the perspec...

Pendant plus de septante ans (de 1918 à 1990), l’acte fondateur du régime soviétique, “la Grande Révolution Socialiste d’Octobre”, se commémore et se donne à voir sous la forme d’un spectacle grandiose lors du 7 novembre, permettant au pouvoir soviétique de se mettre en scène. D’abord organisées sous la forme d’une parade militaire et populaire, le...

The Syrian conflict has challenged both the ways of reporting war and its impact on the public. However, only a few empirical studies have tried to assess public reactions to representations of war. In this paper, we use an empirically-based study that combines quantitative and qualitative methods to assess how Swiss audiences react to crisis repor...

Humanitarianism has been predicated on and constituted by visual images. Operations in the field have had to be recorded, both as a documentary and an anthropological scene, to support themselves ideologically and financially, and to legitimise an event or action as humanitarian. Originally conveyed through illustrations, paintings and ‘visual’ and...

Published in the journal: Traverse - revue d'histoire

Despite the growing interest in the use of child images in humanitarian contexts in the last few years, there has been no transverse study of the iconography of famines in contemporary times. On the contrary, this iconography has been analysed in a scattered way, in disciplinary boundaries that prevent a more global understanding of the birth and u...

This paper examines the place of amateur imagery and citizen photojournalism in Time magazine’s photoblog, Lightbox. If user-generated content has been seen as a threat by professional photojournalists in the last decade, Lightbox offers a paradigmatic example to understand if the visual elite still has a dominant status in the decision-making proc...

This chapter explores the rhetoric of compassion in media framings of humanitarian crises in a historical and cultural perspective across space and time. It shows the first results of an exploratory analysis of media narratives and images of war between the 1960s and the 1990s. Benefiting from the cover of the mass media, modern humanitarianism has...

The purpose of this article is to suggest some historical milestones for a retrospective reflection on the photographic archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). This collection is little used by researchers, although the 120,000 photographs which it contains have helped to forge the symbolism and identity of the institution...

This article focuses on representations of war death in newsmagazines, through four armed conflicts of the end of the 20th century : the Biafran and Rwandan genocides, the civil wars in Lebanon and the Balkans. These visual and discursive representations of war dead’s reveal some differences in the framing depending on the ethnic background of thos...

In this article, we define the notion of ‘celebrity news’, emphasizing the fact that the portrayal of film stars embodies the imitable and the inimitable and, consequently, points towards values. In that context, we discuss the results of a thematic content analysis of a wide corpus of the daily and weekly European, French-speaking printed media to...

Since March 2003 and the beginning of the Second Iraq war, the US government has tried to convince its public opinion of the reality of a “clean war”. However, as the war gets stuck into a stalemate and casualties are increasing, the question of war woundeds and their visibility is raised. Seen as a hero who left to fight, the mutilated soldier rem...

À travers une analyse des contenus des titres de presse de la Suisse romande, cet article se propose d’indiquer plusieurs pistes de réflexion autour de la construction de l’objet people et de ses spécificités en Romandie : quelle place occupent les people dans cette presse d’information générale ? Quelles y sont les célébrités représentées ? Quelle...

This article analyzes the social representations of animals in the Swiss media in two recent crises: the bird flu epidemic (2004–2007) and dog attacks (2005–2008). While animals have been a privileged subject in the media for a long time, they are increasingly characterized in Western societies by ambivalent representations: animals can be consider...

Dans une approche historique, cet article s’efforce de montrer en quoi la politique mémorielle qui suit les deux guerres américaines en Corée et au Vietnam (1950-1975) est une démarche principalement orchestrée par les vétérans de guerre. Le premier mémorial national du Vietnam, inauguré en 1982, témoigne d’un contexte particulièrement militant où...