Browsing by Subject "Humanitarianism"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Codified compassion: politics and principles in humanitarian governance
    (2012-08) Kennedy, Denis V.F.
    This dissertation analyzes recent attempts to devise rules and regulations to govern humanitarian action. Specifically, it asks: What drives humanitarian organizations to collectively regulate their principles, practices, and policies? Self-regulation, or self-organized attempts at collective action within direct state intervention, is a recent global phenomenon, affecting both the for- and non-profit worlds. In humanitarianism alone, there are now dozens of codes of conduct and other mechanisms that implicate all manner of humanitarian practice, from principles to aid provision. This research focuses on four key self-regulatory projects: the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief; the Sphere Project; HAP International; and the Code of Conduct on Images and Messages.Contrary to the widespread view that firms regulate for branding and competitive reasons, this study finds that principled reasons better account for the origins of these initiatives. Specifically, it shows that self-regulation has emerged out of a crisis of legitimacy in the humanitarian sector, whereby aid veterans concluded that good intentions were no longer enough as a basis for action. As Rwanda demonstrated, good intentions can lead to terrible outcomes. Through self-regulation, aid workers have sought to shift humanitarianism's ideational foundations from charity and good deeds to professionalism, technical standards, and human rights. Contestations over self-regulation, in turn, derive from different understandings of humanitarianism - of its meanings and know-how.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Genealogies of Korean adoption: American Empire, militarization, and Yellow Desire
    (2010-05) Pate, SooJin
    This dissertation traces genealogies of Korean adoption that disrupt the dominant narrative of Korean adoption as a) a humanitarian rescue project and b) a reproduction of white heteronormative kinship in order to track the subject formation of the Korean orphan and adoptee. It does so by situating the emergence of Korean adoption neither in the Korean War (1950-1953) nor in the postwar recovery efforts of the U.S. but within the context of U.S. military occupation of the southern portion of Korea that began in 1945—five years prior to the Korean War and ten years before the “official” beginning of Korean adoption. In so doing, I argue that the figures of the Korean orphan and adoptee have defined neocolonial relations between the U.S. and Korea, as well as fostered white heteronormative constructions of the American family and nation. In Chapter One, I link the development of U.S. neocolonialism in South Korea to the neocolonial practice of Korean adoption by demonstrating how U.S. militarism and its policies of militarized humanitarianism became the precursors to this form of child welfare. I suggest that the Korean orphan ushered the arrival of what I call “American humanitarianism empire,” which enabled the U.S. to promote the myth of American exceptionalism while, at the same time, participate in imperial activities in the newly decolonized Korea. In Chapter Two, I argue that the discursive practice of, what I call, “yellow desire” facilitated the inclusion of Korean orphans into the U.S. domestic and national family. Informed by the 1950s Cold War Orientalist policies of racial integration, yellow desire runs on the logic that differences can be absorbed through assimilation. I contend that yellow desire is what compelled average white Americans to adopt Korean children during the era of Asian exclusion. In Chapter Three, I examine the process in which orphans became adoptees. As an institution of discipline and normalization, the orphanage as a “processing station” prepared the child to be incorporated into the white American home. It became the site where Korea’s social outcasts were shaped into useful subjects for the state: economically profitable for Korea and politically beneficial for the U.S. In this way, Korean adoption can be regarded as a civilizing project of modernity that ensures its success as a racially integrative project. Finally, in Chapter Four, I argue that the figure of the Korean adoptee—upon entrance into her new American family—documents the excesses, limits, and contradictions of Korean adoption as a project of empire and as a project of white normativity. Even though the adoptee is disciplined in the orphanage to seamlessly assimilate into her new adoptive family, the very presence of the adoptee’s body within the adoptive family disrupts the semblance of the all-American (read white) nuclear family. As a result, the adoptee’s presence exposes the nonnormative, queer dimensions of Korean adoption. Understanding the figures of the orphan and adoptee as geopolitical and socioeconomic constructions is significant because it not only denaturalizes Korean adoption but also illuminates the pivotal roles they played in building and preserving neocolonial relations between the U.S. and Korea. The dominant narrative of Korean adoption that depicts it as a “humanitarian project” or “rescue mission,” however, makes illegible the material conditions that produced it. By reorienting Korean adoption as a project of empire, I make legible the material conditions of U.S. military intervention and occupation, war, neocolonialism, and militarized humanitarianism—the very conditions that enabled the emergence and persistence of Korean adoption, as well as the subject formations of the orphan and adoptee.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Oral history interview with Isaac Levin Auerbach
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 1992-10) Auerbach, Isaac L. (Isaac Levin), 1921-1992
    Auerbach begins by discussing friction between himself and J. Presper Eckert and his reasons for leaving Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. He recounts the circumstances leading to his employment from 1949-1957 with the Burroughs Corporation, his relations with Irven Travis, who headed the computer department at Burroughs, and the formation of the Burroughs Research Laboratory. He describes a number of projects he managed at Burroughs, including computer equipment for the SAGE project, BEAM I computer, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile System, a magnetic core encryption communications system, and a missile guidance computer used for the Atlas missile. Auerbach comments on his management of the Defense, Space and Special Products Division, the general management of Burroughs, and his decision to leave the company. Auerbach outlines the establishment of Auerbach Electronics (later Auerbach Associates), one of the first computer consulting firms, and describes his initial contacts with RCA (for the BMEWS system), Honeywell, Leeds and Northrup, and Hot Shoppes (Marriott). He describes the growth of the company and other ventures such as Standard Computer Corporation (computer leasing), International Systems (data processing system for parimutuel betting developed with George Skakel of Great Lakes Carbon Corporation), and Auerbach Publishers, a successful venture that became known for its computer product reviews. He describes his concern with military and government contracts, the sale of Auerbach Associates in 1976 to the Calculon Corporation, and his subsequent consulting activity. He concludes with a discussion of his work with the International Federation for Information Processing, the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, and his philanthropic work primarily in the Philadelphia area and Israel.