scholarly journals Vicissitudes of laughter

Pragmatics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-300
Author(s):  
Kevin McKenzie
Keyword(s):  
Job Satisfaction ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
Palestinian Territories ◽  
Humanitarian Aid Workers ◽  
Humanitarian Work ◽  
The Way

Abstract This paper is concerned with the way that laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation in talk among humanitarian aid workers as they describe their professional activities in settings of armed conflict. I first set out to situate my analysis within the tradition of work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM), exploring how that approach differs in significant ways from work in pragmatics and related traditions of discourse analytic research. Unlike the latter approaches, EM examines laughter for the intelligibility it is deployed by speakers to furnish, so that the presumption of laughter’s revelatory nature which characterizes a pragmatically-oriented analysis is seen as a participant resource for rendering the situated significance of actions visible by and for the involved parties of a given episode of interaction. Following this, I examine talk from open-ended interviews with aid agency operatives who work in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, exploring how laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation where the potential accusation of opportunism arises in accounts of personal job satisfaction as against the legitimacy otherwise afforded with an appeal to altruism and self-sacrifice. Where speakers attend to the criticism of humanitarian activity for its significance in affecting outcomes of warfare, the management of these different demands is accomplished in reflexive work to ironize their own and others’ formulations of motivation for pursuing humanitarian work.

The humanitarian imperative under fire

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin McKenzie
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Humanitarian Assistance ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
Palestinian Territories ◽  
Humanitarian Aid Workers ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
The One

This paper explores how speakers manage the dilemmatic tension between competing demands for accountability in mundane explanations of humanitarian assistance in settings of armed conflict. Taking as analytic data talk recorded in interviews with the personnel of aid agencies and various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who work in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), we examine how demands for both non-partisan impartiality, on the one hand, and sympathetic alignment with the victims (or losing parties) of armed conflict, on the other, feature in the explanations that humanitarian aid workers formulate to account for their professional activities. While non-partisanship features as a source of legitimacy given that humanitarian assistance is regarded as a response to universal human suffering, the source of that suffering in armed conflict necessitates recognition of the antagonist-protagonist and victim relationship in order for aid recipients to be identified. Everyday accounts of aid work function to mitigate the otherwise mutually exclusive relationship between competing assumptions that inform the logic of humanitarian assistance.

scholarly journals Work–Life Balance Among Humanitarian Aid Workers

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 1191-1213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miranda Visser ◽  
Melinda Mills ◽  
Liesbet Heyse ◽  
Rafael Wittek ◽  
Vincenzo Bollettino
Keyword(s):  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Life Domain ◽  
Work Life ◽  
Work Life Balance ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Life Balance ◽  
Humanitarian Aid Workers ◽  
Trust In Management ◽  
Humanitarian Work

A limited body of research has examined satisfaction with work–life balance of expatriate workers who live abroad, residing outside the typical “family” or “life” domain. This study aims to demonstrate how and under which organizational circumstances job autonomy can increase work–life balance satisfaction of humanitarian aid expatriates. We hypothesize that especially in humanitarian work, trust in management can buffer potential negative effects of high autonomy. We test our hypothesis by means of ordinal logistic regression, using survey data collected among expatriates of the Operational Center Amsterdam of Médecins Sans Frontières ( N = 142). Results reveal that high levels of autonomy are positively related with work–life balance satisfaction when trust in the management of the organization is high. When trust in management is low, the effect of high autonomy on work–life balance satisfaction is negative. This implies that trust in management indeed buffers negative effects of high autonomy among expatriate humanitarian aid workers.

Formulating professional identity

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin McKenzie
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Moral Legitimacy ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
Palestinian Territories ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Palestinian Population

Recent scholarly and practitioner research on the work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has been concerned with questions about the moral legitimacy of humanitarian aid in settings of armed conflict. At issue is the extent to which NGO activities are said to affect the conduct and outcome of warfare, thereby potentially implicating humanitarian aid in the partisan interests which it has traditionally eschewed as a condition of its legitimacy. This paper explores how such issues are taken up in the explanations offered by humanitarian aid operatives in descriptions of the work they carry out in settings of armed conflict. Drawing on a corpus of conversational material recorded in open-ended interviews with representatives of various NGOs that operate in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), I examine how speakers work to make themselves accountable to demands for sympathetic affiliation with the losing (or vanquished) parties in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict while maintaining a non-aligned stance relative to the partisan considerations that animate that conflict’s conduct. Both in first-hand narrative accounts of personal transformation and in descriptions of contrastive examples where professional colleagues are said to maintain a too-sympathetic affiliation with the partisan concerns of the Palestinian population whose needs they service, speakers work to provide for the legitimacy of their professional activities in the context of otherwise conflicting demands for moral accountability.

A way forward in protecting health services in conflict: moving beyond the humanitarian paradigm

2013 ◽  
Vol 95 (890) ◽  
pp. 331-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard S. Rubenstein
Keyword(s):  
Health Services ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Health Workers ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Indigenous Health ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Humanitarian Aid Workers ◽  
Civilian Protection ◽  
Humanitarian Response

Attacks on health workers, clinics, hospitals, ambulances and patients during periods of armed conflict or civil disturbance pose enormous challenges to humanitarian response and constitute affronts to the imperatives of human rights and civilian protection. Violence inflicted on humanitarian aid workers is gaining the global attention it warrants. While the number of attacks on aid workers has decreased in recent years, in a handful of places, notably Sudan, Afghanistan, and Somalia, they have become more spectacular and frightening, with aid agencies targeted for kidnapping and subjected to use of explosives because of their perceived affiliation with Western governments. The assaults have galvanised the humanitarian aid community to track attacks and to engage in intensive and sophisticated discussion of means to increase operational security. After worldwide consultation, in 2011 the United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issued a report that summarised the fruits of experience and stimulated consideration of security strategies for aid providers. By contrast, however, until very recently the far larger number of incidents of violence inflicted on and interference with indigenous health services and on international and local development agencies by state and armed groups has received comparatively little attention.

Sojourn Abroad: Adjustment Experiences of Missionaries and Humanitarian Aid Workers

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynette H. Bikos ◽  
Michael Klemens ◽  
Leigh Randa ◽  
Alyson Barry ◽  
Thomas Bore
Keyword(s):  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Humanitarian Aid Workers

The Impact of Integrated UN Missions on Humanitarian NGO Security

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-225
Author(s):  
Emizet F. Kisangani ◽  
David F. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Intrastate Conflict ◽  
Conflict Zones ◽  
Humanitarian Aid Workers ◽  
Humanitarian Action ◽  
Generalized Methods Of Moments ◽  
To Come ◽  
Methods Of Moments ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Since the end of the Cold War, the UN has extended many of its missions in conflict zones to include political, military, and humanitarian activities. Many humanitarian nongovernmental organizations have been critical of these “integrated” UN missions, claiming that they can blur the distinction between political, military, and humanitarian action, thus placing humanitarian aid workers at risk of retaliation from warring factions opposed to the UN’s political objectives. This proposition is empirically tested using generalized methods of moments statistical analysis of sixty-seven countries that experienced intrastate conflict between 1997 and 2018. When assessing attacks in general—to include the sum of aid workers killed, wounded, and kidnapped—the results indicate that humanitarian aid workers are more likely to come under attack in countries that have an integrated UN mission. However, when the attacks are assessed separately, results show that this relationship holds only with aid workers who are killed in the field.

Occupational health for humanitarian aid workers in an Ebola outbreak

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannele Haggman ◽  
Joyce Kenkre ◽  
Carolyn Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Occupational Health ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Humanitarian Aid Workers
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