The humanitarian gaze', human rights films, and glocalised social work

This chapter is an attempt to explore how the concept of ‘the humanitarian gaze’ (Tascón 2015) may help social work educators, practitioners, and activists in their activities to promote social equality through cultural representation in a glocalised world. As moving images are used more and more to communicate and express features of our social world, the profession is now required to become adept at working within this new landscape of ‘the social’. Social work scholars and practitioners are increasingly using moving images to illustrate various social issues, and for advocacy and activism. Within the work that social workers perform, the types of moving images used are often of the ‘humanitarian’ type. As we deploy these sorts of images, it is salient to understand their power, as images both express our social worlds but also co-opt us into their messages in distinctly immersive ways. In this chapter I turn to the discursive power of ‘the humanitarian’ and also to the practices of looking that emerge from such a discourse. I will argue that humanitarianism has developed as a global discourse reliant on unequal geopolitical relationships and reproduces this via a consistent feed of negative and catastrophic images of ‘the other’ as frozen in continuous suffering or struggling to become ‘like us’; the discourse is then further reproduced through practices of looking that centre on the searching for and finding these figure types.