Body Knowledge in Post-War Humanitarian Campaigns (360G-Wellcome-212895_Z_18_Z)

The project will look at the different ways in which the body has been used to mobilise public support for humanitarian campaigns in the post-war period. Drawing on the recently catalogued Oxfam collections at the Bodleian Library and the records of the British Leprosy Relief Association (LEPRA) at the Wellcome Library, the project will show how donor and recipient bodies have functioned as sites of learning and feeling. It focuses on two types of activity: the use of medical discourses to describe the suffering bodies of recipients of aid; and donors’ use of self-denial and physical hardship to increase bodily empathy with recipients. By uncovering the different kinds of body knowledge that were developed in this period, the goal is introduce a medical humanities perspective to the history of post-war humanitarian sentiment. In the short term, I will write a journal article on my case studies in the post-war period. In the long term I will use the research as a foundation from which to develop an interdisciplinary collaborative project on embodied empathy, and as the starting point for a monograph on changing attitudes towards body knowledge in humanitarian work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.