This book uncovers the overlooked history of artisanal textiles in projects aimed at social uplift and moral reform. The contributors ask what the implications of this form of gendered craft production are for our understanding of the humanitarian imagination, relations of humanitarian production and the generation of meaning and social and artistic value. It also opens a dialogue with contemporary socially-engaged textile artists to engender critical reflection on the socially-situated meaning of textile craft in past and present humanitarian contexts.

This book explores underexamined sites of interactions and encounters between humanitarians and medical workers during the long Second World War (1931-1953).It traces circulations of humanitarian actors, knowledge, and practices across the world from a conflict to another. In doing so, it demonstrates that the conflict brought about unlikely aid coalitions and intimate networks of aid, and led to a transformation of the relationships between some European organisations and colonial ‘peripheries’, leading to the emergence of new activities and actors.

This article investigates how a medical non-governmental organisation Médecins sans frontières (MSF) developed and promoted the treatment of Hepatitis C (HCV) in Cambodia. The article argues that such a campaign represents a new development for the history of humanitarian medicine. As an experimental historical project, we aimed to capture how a humanitarian organisation defined its intervention as a ‘proof of concept’ and developed a public health campaign from a vertical approach reliant on new and very effective treatments.

This article is also available in French: https://msf-crash.org/fr/medecine-et-sante-publique/lhepatite-c-entre-dans-lhistoire-medecins-sans-frontieres-lhepatite-c-et

Does humanitarian medicine truly exist, or is it merely medicine practiced in a humanitarian setting or with a humanitarian history?

New article published by Bertrand Taithe in the latest issue of Dynamis: Caring for the world: Geography, Religious Cosmovision and Encounters, Elizabeth Wilson’s ‘actionist’ career, 1943-1990’