Regarding the Pain of Others

Taking the title of Susan Sontag’s seminal work as a starting point, this workshop aims at re-opening an old debate about the potentialities of exhibiting other’s suffering in order to promote a culture of peace, prevent war and/or resolve conflict. In this workshop we would like to propose considering the importance of images (not only photographs, but also drawings as well as motion pictures) within the long-term history of humanitarianism, in order to explore the role of emotions in shaping and mobilising public opinion. More particularly, we encourage scholars to think about the ways through which humanitarian images affect us as material objects that have expressive effects related to the circuits, places or circumstances in which they are exhibited.