An analysis of multi-media representations of children's experience of war by humanitarian organizations

This research examines some of the processes humanitarian organizations use to represent war-affected children. Employing discourse analysis of online imagery guided by principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and theories of child development in war, this study analyzes multi-media representations of war-affected youths in Iraq and Afghanistan from the websites of four humanitarian organizations: The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), International Rescue Committee (IRC), War Child Canada, and Photo-voice (UK). I augment this analysis with a sampling of interviews of key informants to gain their insights about this imagery on their websites. This analysis comprises a complex system of signification that represents and communicates via three interrelated mediational components comprised of mission statements, visual archives, and reflections of key informants within each humanitarian organization. The study assesses humanitarian organizations' ability to foreground the perspectives of war-affected children and their families and to recognize the extent to which these representations reflect diverse and complex experiences of such children in the context of everyday life.;This interdisciplinary approach looking across time and context, illuminates some degree of contradiction, even counter-productiveness, between the means and ends of some humanitarian organizations. Systematic analysis based on criteria from the U.N. CRC and on reflections of key informants, indicates that many images of war-affected children foreground economic and public interests (e.g., fundraising, media attention) or the interest of awareness (e.g., lobbying) at the expense of rendering passive the subjects of these images. While such a complex system of signification may appeal to donors and public awareness of sympathy, it also downplays or denies children's right to participate in their own representation and social change. Analysis of these mediational components explains how such images construct specific views of humanitarian organizations about the photographed children, clarifies the power dynamics within each organization, and the criteria in producing and choosing images. In addition to findings about the nature of images of representing children growing up in war circumstances, this dissertation contributes an analytic framework that humanitarian organizations may use to assess their multi-media communications.