On the Production of the Humanitarian Subject : A Decolonial Exploration of Innocence

Abstract: This thesis seeks to explore how humanitarian communication produces subjectivities for individuals. More specifically, it investigates how the innocent modern/colonial humanitarian subject is produced through appeals to emotions. To explore this phenomenon, this thesis develops a decolonial research approach grounded in epistemic disobedience. As such, it first disrupts the binary between rationality and emotions by focusing on the roles of compassion, anger and guilt in the making of the innocent humanitarian subject. Second, it presents autoethnography and storytelling as entry doors into disobeying the binary between subject and object of research. The analysis of the autoethnography is presented in different modes of analysis, between creative and more traditional social science writings. The analysis shows that guilt and knowledge permit to partially defeat the stance of innocence produced by humanitarian communication. Additionally, by recentring racism and European colonialism/imperialism as central to the study of humanitarianism, this thesis demonstrates the importance of adopting decolonial research strategies to defeat persisting structures of inequality.