"Doing it for the 'gram"? The representational politics of popular humanitarianism

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2020.103107Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Digital photography can give rise to new forms of representational politics.

  • People and places are implicated in the affective economy of difference.

  • Self-promotion on Instagram can alter the experience of voluntourism.

Abstract

This paper explores how digital photography – the practice of taking pictures and sharing them via social media – can give rise to representational politics. These politics are pronounced when disadvantaged people and places are the objects of digital representation, as they become (dis)empowered by being implicated in the affective economy of difference. Empirically, we examine the representational practices that Singaporean voluntourists, and companies that organise overseas humanitarian projects, engage in. We highlight how their motivations for engaging with these projects can be obfuscated by the opportunity to generate influence on Instagram, which can then shape the practice of popular humanitarianism. In particular, it can cause encounters with difference to be (cu)rated, influence to be (re)produced, and representation to therefore be (de)valued.

Introduction

Photography was once understood to be a representational practice through which people and places were captured and revealed according to asynchronous space-time logics. Over the past decade, however, the proliferation of smartphones, social media and digital connectivity has transformed this understanding. Digital photography has become a more ubiquitous, synchronous, relational and self-oriented representational practice that has helped to ‘complicat[e] simple models of subject and object, representation and reality, image and process’ (M. Crang, 1997, p. 366). By considering the effects of digital photography on the representation of the self and/to others, this paper brings discourses of popular humanitarianism into conversation with the digitally mediated lives that many of us now lead. No longer does participation in volunteer tourism, for example, necessarily involve being disconnected from home, friends or family. Rather, pervasive digital connectivity now means that the terms by which volunteer tourists engage with, and represent, difference to and through their social networks are increasingly structured by digital logics. In turn, digital structuring has caused these representations of difference to become more nuanced, complex and fraught constructs. With these ideas in mind, this paper updates H.L. Sin's (2009) interrogation of the real value of volunteer tourism by bringing the question of who benefits from popular humanitarianism into conversation with the digital worlds within which humanitarian actors are now implicated. Accordingly, it develops the themes raised by H.L. Sin (2009) – such as what motivates participation in humanitarian projects, how the humanitarian self is performed, and the tensions and paradoxes that emerge in response – through an exploration of the new representational politics of popular humanitarianism. Indeed, given that research into these politics ‘remains relatively thin’ (H.L. Sin & He, 2018, p. 5), this paper can be read as a timely contribution to the discourse.

Our argument is that the representational logics of digital photography increasingly shape the motivations for engaging with, and practices of, popular humanitarianism. Popular humanitarianism encompasses a range of encounters and interventions that people have with relatively disadvantaged people and places. These include participating in volunteering and community service projects, and related practices of marketing, fundraising and project administration as well. Whilst these projects can be domestically oriented, we focus specifically on their overseas dimensions. Encounters with the development differential, and with difference more generally, are arguably more pronounced overseas, meaning actors are more inclined to record and share their experiences photographically. “Actors” is used in a broad sense to include both individuals that participate in humanitarian projects (in particular, volunteer tourists, or voluntourists), as well as those working for organisations that organise and administer such projects. For these actors, the intersection of humanitarianism and photography is problematic, as the altruistic impulses of humanitarianism can reproduce a dialectic of (dis)empowerment through photographic representation. Further complicating this dialectic is the fact that practices of digital photography encourage humanitarian actors to reproduce a ‘transnational cultural logic’ (M. Mostafanezhad, 2014a, p. 2) that can cause genuine concern for disadvantaged others to be obfuscated by the connectivity, and, therefore, the opportunity for self-realisation, that the digital provides. Digital connectivity causes the categories of subject and object to take on expanded meaning that includes not just the relations between photographer and photographed, but also the relations between the photographer and their geographically dispersed social networks. Indeed, when humanitarian actors respond to the aesthetic demands of their social networks, the ‘conceptual and methodological emphasis on a time-bound individual’ (Laurie & Baillie Smith, 2018, p. 99; see also Woods, 2020c) is substituted with more relational understandings of the networked humanitarian instead.

Alongside the expansion of meaning that the digital gives rise to comes the dissolution of boundaries and the reworking of power from an actor-oriented perspective. This constitutes a specific type of “popular humanitarian gaze”, which seeks to ‘reframe contemporary humanitarianism as an empathetic gesture of commoditized concern’ (M. Mostafanezhad, 2014b, p. 111). The pervasive nature of digital photography means that more people are able to engage in these gestures: through the taking and sharing of humanitarian-inspired images, and also through the consumption of, participation in, and responsiveness to the reproduction of online content. These gestures contribute to the emergence of an “affective economy of difference” that is used to attract the attention of (dispersed, and distracted) audiences, and to augment the social positioning of the digitally networked self. It is through digital representation, then, that difference evolves from being an absolutely defined, to a relationally defined, category of interpretation, understanding and value. In turn, affect is an outcome of how audiences relate to these digitally mediated representations of difference. Indeed, the psycho-spatial distance, coupled with the social relativism of digital media foregrounds the need for content creators to reproduce difference in ways that maximise these affective relations. Practices like these cause humanitarian narratives of empathetic concern to become morally implicated in, and inflected by, the structuring logics of the digital. By minimising the barriers to access and dialogue, digital representations help to democratise participation in issues of humanitarian interest. More problematic, however, is the fact that they can also cause these issues to be co-opted into the reproduction of the online self (Mostafanezhad, 2013a, Mostafanezhad, 2013b). To the extent, then, that digital representation serves to expand popular humanitarianism, so too does it foreground its ongoing politicisation.

These dynamics are pronounced in Singapore, which is home to the humanitarian actors that provide the empirical insights upon which this paper is based. In Singapore, community service is prescribed by the education system and has recently started to intersect with the representational practices of young Singaporeans on social media. These practices are interesting and unique for two reasons. One, they sidestep the normative understandings of power implicated in postcolonial/north-south development discourses, whilst simultaneously reconfiguring them in alternative ways. Two, complicating these reproductions is the unique role of the digital, which is used as a channel through which influence – both personal and organisational – is (re)produced. In Singapore, then, as much as practices of popular humanitarianism have become structurally embedded within the education system, so too have young Singaporeans started to harness these practices in order to curate and enhance their social media profiles. In doing so, popular humanitarianism is increasingly implicated in the new representational politics of “doing it for the ‘gram”, which, in some cases, can be seen to reflect and reproduce a ‘narcissistic disposition of voyeuristic altruism rather than commitment to the humanitarian cause’ (L. Chouliaraki, 2012, p. 1). We develop these arguments through three sections. The first considers how practices of digital photography intersect with the (mis)representation of self and other, and how these (mis)representations in turn serve to reproduce an affective economy of difference. The second introduces the empirical context of Singapore, and the methodology. The third is empirical, and explores how the affective economy of difference can cause digitally mediated representational practices to become more morally ambiguous constructs.

Section snippets

Digital shifts and the (mis)representation of self and others

Digital technologies have had a profound effect on the visual representation of the self and/to other(s). They expand the possibilities of visual representation, as a camera (phone) is nearly always within reach, and photos can easily be shared with geographically dispersed social networks. According to Crang (2011, p. 402), this means that ‘we may have to decenter the human within an internet of things that produce a technological form of life’ Decentring causes the individual to become a

Empirical context and methodology

Singapore is a unique context through which the representational politics of popular humanitarianism can be identified and understood. Perhaps most importantly, its location in Southeast Asia means that most Singaporeans are precluded from the postcolonial narrative of guilt and responsibility within which many White/Western development actors are embroiled. In itself, this lends a unique perspective to existing debates surrounding international volunteering, and volunteer tourism in

The representational politics of popular humanitarianism

Many of the humanitarian actors included in our sample openly expressed ulterior motivations to participate in overseas humanitarian programmes. In turn, these motivations caused, to varying degrees, the desire to do good for others to either be obfuscated or obstructed by the desire for some sort of self-realisation (after H.L. Sin, 2009; Molz, 2017). As suggested above, some did it to fulfil the graduation requirements of their university, whilst others did it to bolster their CVs. More

Conclusions

This paper has explored the ways in which photographic representations of difference are problematised in a digital age. Digital practices of photography are different in that they are based on different logics of speed, scale and style to their analogue counterparts. Digital photography has become an any day, anywhere and anytime practice, the effects of which can be disseminated to geographically dispersed networks of followers – and publics – with relative, but not unproblematic, ease. In

Acknowledgements

We would like the thank the anonymous reviewers for close and constructive engagement with an earlier draft of this paper, and Outi Rantala for superb editorial guidance.

Orlando Woods is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Singapore Management University. He is a social and cultural geographer, with thematic research interests spanning religion, urban environments and digital technologies in/and Asia. Affiliation: School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, 90 Stamford Road, Singapore 178903, Singapore.

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    Orlando Woods is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Singapore Management University. He is a social and cultural geographer, with thematic research interests spanning religion, urban environments and digital technologies in/and Asia. Affiliation: School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, 90 Stamford Road, Singapore 178903, Singapore.

    Shee Siew Ying is an MA candidate in Geography at the National University of Singapore. She is a social and cultural geographer, with thematic research interests spanning health, social justice issues and digital technologies. Affiliation: Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, 1 Arts Link, Kent Ridge, Singapore 117570, Singapore.

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