<commit_before>---
title: "New chapter sneak peek"
author: rlburns
layout: post
permalink: /2016/09/sneek-peek/
categories:
  - Academic
  - Research
  - Writing
  - Writing sample
  - digital humanitarianism
  - political economy
  - philanthro-capitalism
---
Here's a sneak peek at a \(completely unedited, un-proofed, rough rough rough\) chapter I'm writing for an edited volume due out next year [\[1\]](#notes-1):

At the heart of this chapter lies the imperative to understand a confluence that is centrally shaping digital economies at the global margins. On the one hand, crowdsourcing, social media, and mass collaboration are increasingly impacting the humanitarian[\[2\]](#notes-2) enterprise through digital humanitarianism \(Meier 2015\); on the other, private, for-profit companies are becoming more involved in humanitarianism under the banner of philanthro-capitalism commonly labeled "corporate responsibility" \(Bishop and Green 2008\). These two distinct shifts together are having profound impacts on humanitarian knowledge, aid allocation, and on humanitarianism's raisons d'&ecirc;tre. In fact, while much has been written about each of these developments individually, here I argue that they are integral components of the same process that will significantly impact the ways in which humanitarianism is conducted in the 21st-century.

Following the historic arc of "disruptive" technologies, for more than a decade technologists have been developing digital spatial technologies that they hope will "revolutionize" humanitarianism. Many claim these "liberation technologies", as they are often called \(Diamond 2010\), can be leveraged as tools to increase democratic decision-making, citizen empowerment, and civic engagement, effectively dislodging humanitarianism, emergency management, and international development from their established modus operandi. This trend seeks to accentuate more "voices" by crowdsourcing the reporting of crime, knowledge, needs, resources, and emergencies; this is accomplished by recruiting labor in platforms like OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, TomNod, and the Standby Task Force, and by scraping resources like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The evidence for digital humanitarianism's impact is quite mixed \(Brandusescu, Sieber, and Jochems 2015; Read, Taithe, and Mac Ginty 2016\), but more importantly, digital humanitarianism has been shown to be a fundamentally social and political enterprise rather than a technical advance \(Burns 2015b; Duffield 2016; Finn and Oreglia 2016\). This means that its development, use, effects, and assumptions all are situated within socio-spatial contexts, which necessitate critical scrutiny on those terms \(Burns 2014; Crawford and Finn 2015\). 

In a concurrent shift, private, for-profit businesses have recently become more intimately involved in philanthropy and humanitarianism. Most paradigmatically, this shift is characterized by private companies positioning philanthropy at the center of their business model, such that the act of philanthropic giving generates profit for the company. In this new age of philanthro-capitalism, companies accumulate capital through leveraging moral economies \(Fridell and Konings 2013\). Toms Shoes's business model exemplifies this shift, in that for every pair of shoes someone purchases, a second pair would be donated to "a person in need" . Zizek \(The RSA 2010\) has argued that far from this shift being a political-economic exception, "charity is no longer an idiosyncrasy of some good guys here and there, but the basic constituent of our economy".

These two shifts - toward digital humanitarianism and philanthro-capitalism - should be understood in the context of a greater climate of austerity and neoliberal political-economic reforms in humanitarianism. Harvey \(2005, 2\) describes neoliberalism as a theory of political economy emphasizing entrepreneurialism and "strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade." It entails the injection of these free-market principles into public sector operations and policy-making, as well as everyday life \(Larner 2000; Birch and Siemiatycki 2015\). In this configuration, the role of the state is to provide the framework for the private sector's flourishing, to create markets where they did not previously exist, and surrender public assets for capital accumulation purposes \(Peck and Tickell 2002\).  

In this paper I argue that these phenomena signal broader shifting relationships between the state and the private sector, which is enabled through digital humanitarian technologies. These shifts increasingly inculcate private, for-profit logics, rationalities, and imperatives into humanitarianism, aid relief, and most broadly the public sector. More specifically, I argue that in the context of increasing austerity and the drive to "do more with less", humanitarian organizations see digital spatial technologies as an innovation that enables their continued functioning. In the process of adopting digital humanitarianism, the project of humanitarianism becomes more capitalist. I substantiate this argumentation by drawing on ethnographic research conducted 2012-2013 with a public policy research institution intimately involved in ongoing efforts to proliferate digital humanitarianism in the public sector. 

Below, I begin by contextualizing the emergence of digital humanitarianism and philanthro-capitalism within existing research. Most extant literature on these topics tends to understand them as separate phenomena, coincidentally contemporaneous; in fact, very little work has sought to understand them in relation to each other. Following a brief description of the broader research project from which this manuscript draws, and in particular the extended case method \(Burawoy 1998\) approach, I develop my argument along three lines. First I demonstrate that for public sector humanitarian agencies, digital humanitarianism represents an "innovation" that assuages the pressures created by neoliberal reforms. This, in turn, produces new modalities of the neoliberalization of humanitarian aid, in a three-fold process: \(1\) for-profit entities adopt data and technology-related roles and responsibilities previously within the state's purview, \(2\) public sector actors internalize many of the logics and rationalities typical of the private, for-profit sector, and \(3\) this is facilitated more broadly by the dual "roll-back" and "roll-out" emblematic of state neoliberalization. Second, digital humanitarianism introduces a new array of mechanisms and groundings through which the languages, rationalities, and motivations of for-profit businesses percolate through formal humanitarianism. Third, these incursions of the private sector into humanitarianism can be seen as philanthro-capitalism, wherein for-profit institutions and their charitable arms accumulate capital by developing digital humanitarian technologies and data. I conclude by noting that this new collusion between the private and public/non-profit sectors is successful largely because it relies on unquestioned assumptions about the inherent "good" of philanthropy and humanitarianism. These assumptions and their often explicitly-vocalized defenses effectively depoliticize the further neoliberalization of humanitarianism, obscuring the tradeoffs and consequences of digital technologies and removing digital humanitarianism from the realm of legitimate critique.

 
**Notes**
<a name = "notes-1"> </a>Sections of this manuscript have been adapted from my unpublished dissertation. The citation is as follows: <NAME>. 2015. Digital Humanitarianism and the Geospatial Web: Emerging Modes of Mapping and the Transformation of Humanitarian Practices. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/33947 \(last accessed 29 August 2016\).   

<a name = "notes-2"> </a>In this manuscript I often use the term "humanitarianism" to describe processes, institutions, and imperatives many might associate more with emergency management, disaster relief, and international development. While each of these can be distinguished in concept, practice, and associated research agenda, they are fundamentally "deeply interlocked regimes of knowledge, power, and morality" \(Burns 2015a, 25\). Each can be understood as a set of socio-political projects aimed at establishing and normalizing relations that prioritize power and knowledges from the global North, while invoking a moral economy of intervention \(Said 1979; Escobar 1995; Bebbington 2000; Calhoun 2004; Lawson 2007; Fassin 2012; Weizman 2012\).   

**Bibliography**
<NAME>. 2000. Reencountering Development: Livelihood Transitions and Place Transformations in the Andes. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 \(3\):495-520.
<NAME>., and <NAME>. 2015. Neoliberalism and the Geographies of Marketization: The Entangling of State and Markets. Progress in Human Geography. http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/03/04/0309132515570512.full \(last accessed 10 April 2015\).
<NAME>., and <NAME>. 2008. Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
<NAME>., <NAME>, and <NAME>. 2015. Confronting the Hype: The Use of Crisis Mapping for Community Development. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. http://con.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/05/15/1354856515584320.full \(last accessed 29 August 2016\).
<NAME>. 1998. The Extended Case Method. Sociological Theory 16 \(1\):4-33.
<NAME>. 2014. Moments of Closure in the Knowledge Politics of Digital Humanitarianism. Geoforum 53:51-62.
———. 2015a. Digital Humanitarianism and the Geospatial Web: Emerging Modes of Mapping and the Transformation of Humanitarian Practices. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/33947 \(last accessed 29 August 2016\).
———. 2015b. Rethinking Big Data in Digital Humanitarianism: Practices, Epistemologies, and Social Relations. GeoJournal 80 \(4\):477-490.
<NAME>. 2004. A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of the Cosmopolitan Order. Canadian Review of Sociology &amp; Anthropology 41 \(4\):373-395.
<NAME>., and <NAME>. 2015. The Limits of Crisis Data: Analytical and Ethical Challenges of Using Social and Mobile Data to Understand Disasters. GeoJournal 80 \(4\):491-502.
<NAME>. 2010. Liberation Technology. Journal of Democracy 21 \(3\):69-83.
<NAME>. 2016. The Resilience of the Ruins: Towards a Critique of Digital Humanitarianism. Resilience :1-19.
<NAME>. 1995. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press.
<NAME>. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
<NAME>., and <NAME>. 2016. A Fundamentally Confused Document: Situation Reports and the Work of Producing Humanitarian Information. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work &amp; Social Computing, 1349-1362. ACM http://www.ercolino.eu/docs/Oreglia_Pub_Fundamentally%20Confused%20Document%202016_AD.pdf \(last accessed 29 August 2016\).
<NAME>., and <NAME>s. 2013. Age of Icons: Exploring Philanthrocapitalism in the Contemporary World. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
<NAME>. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, USA.
<NAME>. 2000. Neo-liberalism: Policy, ideology, governmentality. Studies in political economy 63.
<NAME>. 2007. Making Development Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
<NAME>. 2015. Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
<NAME>., and <NAME>. 2002. Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34 \(3\):380-404.
<NAME>., <NAME>, and <NAME>. 2016. Data hubris? Humanitarian information systems and the mirage of technology. Third World Quarterly 37 \(8\):1314-1331.
<NAME>. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
<NAME>., <NAME>, <NAME>, and <NAME>. 2014. Humanitarian Technology: A Critical Research Agenda. International Review of the Red Cross 86 \(893\):219-242.
The RSA. 2010. Slavoj Zizek - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvakA-DF6Hc&amp;feature=youtube_gdata_player \(last accessed 10 March 2014\).
<NAME>. 2012. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. New York: Verso Books.
<commit_msg>minor changes<commit_after>---
title: "New chapter sneak peek"
author: rlburns
layout: post
permalink: /2016/09/sneak-peek/
categories:
  - Academic
  - Research
  - Writing
  - Writing sample
  - digital humanitarianism
  - political economy
  - philanthro-capitalism
---
Here's a sneak peek at a \(completely unedited, un-proofed, rough rough rough\) chapter I'm writing for an edited volume due out next year [\[1\]](#notes-1):

At the heart of this chapter lies the imperative to understand a confluence that is centrally shaping digital economies at the global margins. On the one hand, crowdsourcing, social media, and mass collaboration are increasingly impacting the humanitarian[\[2\]](#notes-2) enterprise through digital humanitarianism \(Meier 2015\); on the other, private, for-profit companies are becoming more involved in humanitarianism under the banner of philanthro-capitalism commonly labeled "corporate responsibility" \(Bishop and Green 2008\). These two distinct shifts together are having profound impacts on humanitarian knowledge, aid allocation, and on humanitarianism's raisons d'&ecirc;tre. In fact, while much has been written about each of these developments individually, here I argue that they are integral components of the same process that will significantly impact the ways in which humanitarianism is conducted in the 21st-century.

Following the historic arc of "disruptive" technologies, for more than a decade technologists have been developing digital spatial technologies that they hope will "revolutionize" humanitarianism. Many claim these "liberation technologies", as they are often called \(Diamond 2010\), can be leveraged as tools to increase democratic decision-making, citizen empowerment, and civic engagement, effectively dislodging humanitarianism, emergency management, and international development from their established modus operandi. This trend seeks to accentuate more "voices" by crowdsourcing the reporting of crime, knowledge, needs, resources, and emergencies; this is accomplished by recruiting labor in platforms like OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, TomNod, and the Standby Task Force, and by scraping resources like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The evidence for digital humanitarianism's impact is quite mixed \(Brandusescu, Sieber, and Jochems 2015; Read, Taithe, and Mac Ginty 2016\), but more importantly, digital humanitarianism has been shown to be a fundamentally social and political enterprise rather than a technical advance \(Burns 2015b; Duffield 2016; Finn and Oreglia 2016\). This means that its development, use, effects, and assumptions all are situated within socio-spatial contexts, which necessitate critical scrutiny on those terms \(Burns 2014; Crawford and Finn 2015\). 

In a concurrent shift, private, for-profit businesses have recently become more intimately involved in philanthropy and humanitarianism. Most paradigmatically, this shift is characterized by private companies positioning philanthropy at the center of their business model, such that the act of philanthropic giving generates profit for the company. In this new age of philanthro-capitalism, companies accumulate capital through leveraging moral economies \(Fridell and Konings 2013\). Toms Shoes's business model exemplifies this shift, in that for every pair of shoes someone purchases, a second pair would be donated to "a person in need" . Zizek \(The RSA 2010\) has argued that far from this shift being a political-economic exception, "charity is no longer an idiosyncrasy of some good guys here and there, but the basic constituent of our economy".

These two shifts - toward digital humanitarianism and philanthro-capitalism - should be understood in the context of a greater climate of austerity and neoliberal political-economic reforms in humanitarianism. Harvey \(2005, 2\) describes neoliberalism as a theory of political economy emphasizing entrepreneurialism and "strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade." It entails the injection of these free-market principles into public sector operations and policy-making, as well as everyday life \(Larner 2000; Birch and Siemiatycki 2015\). In this configuration, the role of the state is to provide the framework for the private sector's flourishing, to create markets where they did not previously exist, and surrender public assets for capital accumulation purposes \(Peck and Tickell 2002\).  

In this paper I argue that these phenomena signal broader shifting relationships between the state and the private sector, which is enabled through digital humanitarian technologies. These shifts increasingly inculcate private, for-profit logics, rationalities, and imperatives into humanitarianism, aid relief, and most broadly the public sector. More specifically, I argue that in the context of increasing austerity and the drive to "do more with less", humanitarian organizations see digital spatial technologies as an innovation that enables their continued functioning. In the process of adopting digital humanitarianism, the project of humanitarianism becomes more capitalist. I substantiate this argumentation by drawing on ethnographic research conducted 2012-2013 with a public policy research institution intimately involved in ongoing efforts to proliferate digital humanitarianism in the public sector. 

Below, I begin by contextualizing the emergence of digital humanitarianism and philanthro-capitalism within existing research. Most extant literature on these topics tends to understand them as separate phenomena, coincidentally contemporaneous; in fact, very little work has sought to understand them in relation to each other. Following a brief description of the broader research project from which this manuscript draws, and in particular the extended case method \(Burawoy 1998\) approach, I develop my argument along three lines. First I demonstrate that for public sector humanitarian agencies, digital humanitarianism represents an "innovation" that assuages the pressures created by neoliberal reforms. This, in turn, produces new modalities of the neoliberalization of humanitarian aid, in a three-fold process: \(1\) for-profit entities adopt data and technology-related roles and responsibilities previously within the state's purview, \(2\) public sector actors internalize many of the logics and rationalities typical of the private, for-profit sector, and \(3\) this is facilitated more broadly by the dual "roll-back" and "roll-out" emblematic of state neoliberalization. Second, digital humanitarianism introduces a new array of mechanisms and groundings through which the languages, rationalities, and motivations of for-profit businesses percolate through formal humanitarianism. Third, these incursions of the private sector into humanitarianism can be seen as philanthro-capitalism, wherein for-profit institutions and their charitable arms accumulate capital by developing digital humanitarian technologies and data. I conclude by noting that this new collusion between the private and public/non-profit sectors is successful largely because it relies on unquestioned assumptions about the inherent "good" of philanthropy and humanitarianism. These assumptions and their often explicitly-vocalized defenses effectively depoliticize the further neoliberalization of humanitarianism, obscuring the tradeoffs and consequences of digital technologies and removing digital humanitarianism from the realm of legitimate critique.

 
**Notes**
<a name = "notes-1"> </a>Sections of this manuscript have been adapted from my unpublished dissertation. The citation is as follows: <NAME>. 2015. Digital Humanitarianism and the Geospatial Web: Emerging Modes of Mapping and the Transformation of Humanitarian Practices. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/33947 \(last accessed 29 August 2016\).   

<a name = "notes-2"> </a>In this manuscript I often use the term "humanitarianism" to describe processes, institutions, and imperatives many might associate more with emergency management, disaster relief, and international development. While each of these can be distinguished in concept, practice, and associated research agenda, they are fundamentally "deeply interlocked regimes of knowledge, power, and morality" \(Burns 2015a, 25\). Each can be understood as a set of socio-political projects aimed at establishing and normalizing relations that prioritize power and knowledges from the global North, while invoking a moral economy of intervention \(Said 1979; Escobar 1995; Bebbington 2000; Calhoun 2004; Lawson 2007; Fassin 2012; Weizman 2012\).   

**Bibliography**
<NAME>. 2000. Reencountering Development: Livelihood Transitions and Place Transformations in the Andes. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 \(3\):495-520.

<NAME>., and <NAME>. 2015. Neoliberalism and the Geographies of Marketization: The Entangling of State and Markets. Progress in Human Geography. http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/03/04/0309132515570512.full \(last accessed 10 April 2015\).

<NAME>., and <NAME>. 2008. Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

<NAME>., <NAME>, and <NAME>. 2015. Confronting the Hype: The Use of Crisis Mapping for Community Development. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. http://con.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/05/15/1354856515584320.full \(last accessed 29 August 2016\).

<NAME>. 1998. The Extended Case Method. Sociological Theory 16 \(1\):4-33.

<NAME>. 2014. Moments of Closure in the Knowledge Politics of Digital Humanitarianism. Geoforum 53:51-62.

———. 2015a. Digital Humanitarianism and the Geospatial Web: Emerging Modes of Mapping and the Transformation of Humanitarian Practices. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/33947 \(last accessed 29 August 2016\).

———. 2015b. Rethinking Big Data in Digital Humanitarianism: Practices, Epistemologies, and Social Relations. GeoJournal 80 \(4\):477-490.

<NAME>. 2004. A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of the Cosmopolitan Order. Canadian Review of Sociology &amp; Anthropology 41 \(4\):373-395.

<NAME>., and <NAME>. 2015. The Limits of Crisis Data: Analytical and Ethical Challenges of Using Social and Mobile Data to Understand Disasters. GeoJournal 80 \(4\):491-502.

<NAME>. 2010. Liberation Technology. Journal of Democracy 21 \(3\):69-83.

<NAME>. 2016. The Resilience of the Ruins: Towards a Critique of Digital Humanitarianism. Resilience :1-19.

<NAME>. 1995. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press.

<NAME>. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

<NAME>., and <NAME>. 2016. A Fundamentally Confused Document: Situation Reports and the Work of Producing Humanitarian Information. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work &amp; Social Computing, 1349-1362. ACM http://www.ercolino.eu/docs/Oreglia_Pub_Fundamentally%20Confused%20Document%202016_AD.pdf \(last accessed 29 August 2016\).

<NAME>., and <NAME> eds. 2013. Age of Icons: Exploring Philanthrocapitalism in the Contemporary World. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

<NAME>. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, USA.

<NAME>. 2000. Neo-liberalism: Policy, ideology, governmentality. Studies in political economy 63.

<NAME>. 2007. Making Development Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

<NAME>. 2015. Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

<NAME>., and <NAME>. 2002. Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34 \(3\):380-404.

<NAME>., <NAME>, and <NAME>. 2016. Data hubris? Humanitarian information systems and the mirage of technology. Third World Quarterly 37 \(8\):1314-1331.

Said, E. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

<NAME>., <NAME>, <NAME>, and <NAME>. 2014. Humanitarian Technology: A Critical Research Agenda. International Review of the Red Cross 86 \(893\):219-242.

The RSA. 2010. <NAME> - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvakA-DF6Hc&amp;feature=youtube_gdata_player \(last accessed 10 March 2014\).

<NAME>. 2012. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. New York: Verso Books.

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