Arjun Shankar

In this workshop we excavate the racializing dimensions of humanitarian and development work. Racialization as an analytical focus has been largely absent from theoretical engagements with development and humanitarianism and even less has been written about the emerging racialization processes that might be associated with 21st century humanitarian and development interventions, which exist in complex economic, technological, and political re-formations as the world is at once increasingly interconnected and balkanized. Towards this end, we locate racializing processes at the center of how humanitarian and development interventions can occur in our historical moment, shaped at once by, at the very least, the War on Terror, an ever-expanding refugee crisis, massive economic growth by BRICS nations, ongoing legacies of settler colonialism, and post-disaster imperial oversights in the Caribbean. In so doing, we will also imagine alternative approaches to alleviating the ills of global inequality.