Humanitarian/Consumer?

WiSER invites you to a public panel

Humanitarian or Consumer? Neoliberal Culture, the Ethics of Mediation and the Transnational

The panel considers questions of inequality, forms of post-humanitarianism, and emergent consumer cultures tightly wound into neoliberal power. It does so in order to consider their relation to questions of solidarity with and care for vulnerable others. What forms of solidarity become possible in highly mediated consumer cultures? How is consumer-driven inequality  perpetuated and globalized through media discourses? Panellists will consider how notions of compassionate consumption and the preoccupation with self instead of others instrumentalize solidarity in the global humanitarian market. Questions of pity, responsibility, help and the use of irony, are considered in relation to issues such as transnational adoption, military markets for humanitarian intervention, and the invocation of care across a sharp north-south divide.