PhD Researcher at the Priestley International Centre for Climate, University of Leeds, United Kingdom.
Behavioral and Social Scientist at the RAND Corporation, United States.
Disasters. 2023 Oct;47(4):913-941. doi: 10.1111/disa.12576. Epub 2023 Apr 26.
Narratives are a means of making sense of disasters and crises. The humanitarian sector communicates stories widely, encompassing representations of peoples and events. Such communications have been critiqued for misrepresenting and/or silencing the root causes of disasters and crises, depoliticising them. What has not been researched is how such communications represent disasters and crises in Indigenous settings. This is important because processes such as colonisation are often at the origin but are typically masked in communications. A narrative analysis of humanitarian communications is employed here to identify and characterise narratives in humanitarian communications involving Indigenous Peoples. Narratives differ based upon how the humanitarians who produce them think that disasters and crises should be governed. The paper concludes that humanitarian communications reflect more about the relationship between the international humanitarian community and its audience than reality, and underlines that narratives mask global processes that link audiences of humanitarian communications with Indigenous Peoples.
叙事是理解灾难和危机的一种方式。人道主义部门广泛传播故事，包括对人民和事件的描述。此类传播因对灾难和危机的根本原因进行错误描述和/或缄默、使其非政治化而受到批评。尚未研究的是此类传播如何在土著环境中描述灾难和危机。这一点很重要，因为殖民化等过程往往是灾难和危机的根源，但在传播中却常常被掩盖。本文采用叙事分析方法，旨在识别和描述涉及土著人民的人道主义传播中的叙事。这些叙事因制作它们的人道主义者认为灾难和危机应该如何治理而有所不同。本文最后得出结论，人道主义传播反映的更多是国际人道主义界与其受众之间的关系，而非现实，并强调叙事掩盖了将人道主义传播的受众与土著人民联系起来的全球进程。
