“Every Person Counts: The Problem of Scale in Everyday Humanitarianism,” by Anne-Meike Fechter.“
“Afterword: Humanitarianism, Between Situated Universality and Interventional Universalism,” by Didier Fassin.
12/03/2025 12:00-1:30pm CET
The Quiet Aid Reading Group is resuming its activities. Effective March 12, 2025, our team will convene regularly. We will discuss articles and book chapters, featuring two works at each meeting. The first meeting of this semester, themed “Recent Debates in the Anthropology of Humanitarianism,” will commence with a discussion of two papers from a special issue, Vernacular Humanitarianisms, published in the journal Social Anthropology in 2023. The first article was written by Anne-Meike Fechter, titled “Every Person Counts: The Problem of Scale in Everyday Humanitarianism.” Through a comprehensive analysis of scale-making cases that focus on the individual, Fechter demonstrates how practitioners challenge the limits of everyday humanitarianism and reveals that scale-making and its practices encompass a variety of meanings and practices. The second article that we discuss is Didier Fassin’s “Afterword: Humanitarianism: Between Situated Universality and Interventional Universalism.” In his afterword, Fassin poses profound questions in light of the special issue’s focus on vernacular humanitarianisms. He asserts that a concentration on the situated universality of humanitarianism does not preclude interventionist humanitarianism.