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2019 | Book

NGO Economies of Affect: Humanitarianism and Childhood in Contemporary and Historical Perspective Read chapter Read first chapter

Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention

Processes of Affective Commodification and Objectification

Editors: Kristen Cheney, Aviva Sinervo

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Palgrave Studies on Children and Development

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. NGO Economies of Affect: Humanitarianism and Childhood in Contemporary and Historical Perspective
Abstract
Global humanitarian interventions on behalf of children often commodify forms of childhood “disadvantage,” defined as non-normative, endangered, and vulnerable. Such processes of commodification rely on circulating affects that are productive of, and produced by, universalized stereotypes of an “ideal” childhood. This chapter offers a political economic analysis that takes into account how affect is used strategically to create “childhood need” as a marketable product in the humanitarian and development fields. Considering how vulnerability is read through colonial and neoliberal categories of age, gender, race, and culture, we ask how affectively driven categories of childhood suffering are deployed in transnational humanitarian discourse. What gives such portraits of childhood their power, how do organizations use them, and what are the consequences for children, their families, and their communities? The chapter outlines a brief history of global and regional humanitarian movements and actions with regard to children’s well-being, noting how the lines between charity, humanitarian, development, and child protection work have historically been blurred. We close with a conceptual unpacking of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as transnational actors and the moral underpinnings of their activities, as well as a discussion on why childhood is so easily utilized, idealized, and affectively framed within humanitarian discourse.
Aviva Sinervo, Kristen Cheney
Chapter 2. The Orphan Industrial Complex: The Charitable Commodification of Children and Its Consequences for Child Protection
Abstract
Orphans are often seen as the quintessential children in need of intervention to prevent their suffering. Many charitable organizations promote the building of orphanages, encourage volunteer work at such institutions, and even posit international adoption as a solution to purported “orphan crises.” Western demand for humanitarian experiences with orphans thus engages children in developing countries directly with international capital through an increasingly prevalent lay humanitarianism in developing countries whose “orphans” are targeted for “rescue.” Such engagement, we argue, is fostering the growth of a global “orphan industrial complex.” This chapter explicates the concept of the orphan industrial complex to argue that persistent narratives of “orphan rescue” not only commodify orphans and orphanhood itself but—counter to their stated goal—can actually spur the “production” of “orphans,” resulting in child exploitation and trafficking. The orphan industrial complex is therefore jeopardizing not only children but families, communities, and even entire national child protection systems.
Kristen Cheney, Stephen Ucembe
Chapter 3. Letting Girls Learn, Letting Girls Rise: Commodifying Girlhoods in Humanitarian Campaigns
Abstract
This chapter illustrates how girlhoods from the Global South are commodified by the affective regimes of humanitarian government that animate the Let Girls Learn and Girl Rising campaigns. I illustrate how urgency around girls’ education within the Let Girls Learn campaign is anchored in moral sentiments which are attached to former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama as she conveys the successes of her own ‘bootstraps narrative’ and epitomizes the anticipated guarantees of neoliberal girlhood. Ordinary U.S. citizens are affected by the feelings of concern and possibility generated by Michelle Obama, as well as by campaign promotional videos, and become positioned as “everyday activists.” The construction of everyday activists as global humanitarians who “let girls learn” and “let girls rise” occurs through the commodification of poor, racialized girls.
Karishma Desai
Chapter 4. Commodification in Multiple Registers: Child Workers, Child Consumers, and Child Labor NGOs in India
Abstract
Using the term ‘commodity’ as an analytic, this chapter considers the persistence of an iconography of victimhood in dominant representations of child labor in India favored by ‘blanket ban’ NGOs. Drawing on a historiography of child labor legislations, dating from nineteenth century Britain, I explore ‘child labor’ as an affective commodity based on its victimhood imagery, which is readily recognized and consumed in global humanitarian markets today. In the context of NGOs in India, such affective representations also perform a particular NGO identity, one that delineates the “uncompromising” abolitionist stance of blanket ban NGOs, in contrast to the more accommodating stance of the Indian state. The affective logics of ‘child labor’ however, do not square well with the desires and aspirations of “real” working children who are economic agents and desiring subjects in their own right. Drawing on ethnographic research, I describe how ‘child labor,’ as an affective commodity, serves to discipline the Kanchipuram’s working children—in particular the consumption desires of boys—who are now increasingly represented by NGOs as victims of consumerism.
Miriam Thangaraj
Chapter 5. A Tale of Two NGO Discourses: NGO Stories of Suffering Qur’anic School Children in Senegal
Abstract
Transnational actors have identified thousands of Qur’anic students throughout Senegal, West Africa, called taalibes, as a particularly “vulnerable” population of children, and have taken up the challenge to promote their well-being and human rights. These adult actors surrounding the taalibes tell diverging stories of the children’s suffering related to their street begging. Some frame the begging as child trafficking, where children are brought from rural to urban centers by their alleged religious instructors in order to profit from their forced begging and labor. Others frame taalibe begging as a religious tradition and a spiritually conditioning act, but one that has dangerously increased in scale due to rural poverty leading to mass urban migration. These two discourses present conflicting explanations of the problems as well as their potential solutions, yet they are often used interchangeably by actors as they rally support for their activities among local and international observers. To gain financial and political support for their operations, NGOs commodify taalibe suffering by articulating it within one of these two conflicting discourses, which I claim leads to popular and professional division on the issue and prolongs government inaction to assure basic rights for the taalibes on a national scale.
Sara E. Lahti
Chapter 6. The Right to Play Versus the Right to War? Vulnerable Childhood in Lebanon’s NGOization
Abstract
In the wake of the massive human displacement from Syria (2011–), some international NGOs (INGOs) have intervened in Lebanon to prevent Lebanese and Syrian youth from “radicalizing” and joining armed groups. In the framework of international humanitarian assistance within the “Global South,” while refugee adults are expected to become self-reliant, children and youth are often addressed as objects of universal concern and rarely as aware subjects of decision-making. Drawing on interviews conducted between Spring 2015 and Autumn 2016 with INGO workers and child players and their parents, we consider INGO play activities in contexts where political violence is widespread and longstanding, such as the Tripoli governorate in northern Lebanon. This chapter first aims to unpack the INGO discourse on children’s vulnerability. Second, we analyze INGO discourses and practices in a bid to critically examine the humanitarian and developmental attempts at providing politically neutral spaces for refugee and local children. We therefore build a threefold analysis focusing on the dehistoricization of political violence in the Arab Levant, the employment of the “Sport for Development” formula as a path to social cohesion, and the weak cultural literacy of INGOs in regard to contextual adult-child relations. Thereby, we argue that while INGOs tend to commodify the child as an a priori humanitarian victim, the international assistance community should rather strive to provide children with alternate avenues for political engagement in order to counter war recruitment.
Estella Carpi, Chiara Diana
Chapter 7. Need Saving?/Saving Need: Intersecting Discourses on Urban Children, Families, and Need in a U.S. Faith-Based Organization
Abstract
This chapter examines social constructions of children’s needs within a faith-based organization (FBO) in a southern U.S. city. Building upon analyses of child-centered humanitarian efforts, I argue that age was used to configure assistance and shape the construction of “vulnerability” for participating urban children. Staff members conceptualized children’s needs using representations of innocent childhoods, while intertwining these representations with racialized portrayals of low-income, African American families to mark participating children as in need of “saving,” socially, morally, and primarily from “problematic” adult family members who were viewed as obstacles, more than assets, to children’s success. This programmatic focus on individual children both funneled services away from family needs and shifted agency efforts and funds from the social, political, and economic processes that produced and maintained inequality in the urban neighborhood sites of this research. Yet, children spoke differently about their families and lives, and understood participation in the afterschool program as one place of support among many. In light of these differences, this chapter explores the relationships of power that exist in the contested spaces between the construction of children’s needs and children’s lived realities to show how U.S. charitable FBO discourses and practices affect the available resources for low-income families.
Caroline E. Compretta
Chapter 8. Flattening Need and Steepening Responsibility: Navigating Access to Islands of Care for Children Living with HIV in Uganda
Abstract
In this chapter, I look at an organization providing care for children living with HIV in Uganda as an example of how NGOs define childhood in particular ways, which in turn determines which children are able to access care and what kinds of assistance they receive. I use the metaphor of landscapes to explore the ways in which responsibilities become overlaid onto needs to create islands of care—alternately placing children on these islands, or leaving them stranded with no way to access them. The tensions between vulnerability and responsibility, and dependency and entitlement manifested at a treatment center for children living with HIV as children and caregivers attempted to navigate the terrain created by both on-the-ground service providers and distant donors. I wish to complicate the responsibilization of children and young people, not denying their agency, but recognizing the circumstances which constrain it. I evoke a Kiganda ethics of interdependence, to demonstrate that dependency is not necessarily irresponsible nor disempowering but can be a viable strategy for accessing resources. In brief, I join the many scholars who have criticized the dominance of sustainable development rhetoric and I call for a reconsideration of the viability of unconditional aid.
Colleen Walsh Lang
Chapter 9. Forming a Humanitarian Brand: Childhood and Affect in Central Australia
Abstract
This chapter draws upon ethnographic research with an international NGO working with Indigenous communities in the central desert of Australia. International NGOs have often relied upon the commodification of children in the Global South as the face of their brands, in order to raise funds. I argue that humanitarian imagery is produced according to particular norms that aim at cultivating the “immaterial labor” (Hardt and Negri 2004) of a consumer, inviting them to self-identify with the position of a donor. However, the Indigenous people in my study, when drawn into humanitarian brand discourse, problematize the recognizable frames of the brand by resisting the adoption of standardized humanitarian postures, subsequently breaking with the North–South divide upon which the brand usually relies, and identifying with the position of donor and not recipient. I thereby consider the ways in which the humanitarian brand does not simply link the positions of donor and recipient, but also constitutes and enacts those positions in a productive network.
Drew Anderson
Correction to: The Right to Play Versus the Right to War? Vulnerable Childhood in Lebanon’s NGOization
Estella Carpi, Chiara Diana
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention
Editors
Kristen Cheney
Aviva Sinervo
Copyright Year
2019
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-01623-4
Print ISBN
978-3-030-01622-7
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01623-4

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