Digital Skills Training and the Systematic Exclusion of Refugees in Lebanon
Rabih Shibli
and
Sarah Kouzi

identified to ‘alleviate the burdens on the local labour market’ 6 are the ones that limit refugees’ work permits to daily jobs in agriculture, construction and cleaning services. The Ministry of Labour (MoL) justified the restrictions by claims to reduce competition with the Lebanese in an oversaturated local market, and to avoid offering refugees means for a stable income. Although online work was not mentioned in MoL’s restrictions list

Journal of Humanitarian Affairs
Lessons Learned from an Intervention by Médecins Sans Frontières
Maria Ximena Di Lollo
,
Elena Estrada Cocina
,
Francisco De Bartolome Gisbert
,
Raquel González Juarez
, and
Ana Garcia Mingo

was completely random, regardless of care home size, resources or structure. Pillars of Care Home Intervention MSF provided onsite and virtual assistance, offering technical advice and training in different kinds of residential care homes. Our work was centred around three main pillars: knowledge sharing and training, implementation of IPC measures in care homes and advocacy. Knowledge sharing and training. The scientific

Journal of Humanitarian Affairs
Open Access (free)
James Baldwin and the Broken Silences of Black Queer Men
McKinley E Melton

James Baldwin writes within and against the testimonial tradition emerging from the Black Church, challenging the institution’s refusal to acknowledge the voices and experiences of black queer men. Baldwin’s autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, creates a space for Baldwin’s testimony to be expressed, and also lays the foundation for a tradition of black queer artists to follow. In the contemporary moment, poet Danez Smith inhabits Baldwin’s legacy, offering continuing critiques of the rigidity of conservative Christian ideologies, while publishing and performing poetry that gives voice to their own experiences, and those of the black queer community at large. These testimonies ultimately function as a means of rhetorical resistance, which not only articulates black queer lives and identities, but affirms them.  

James Baldwin Review
James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head
Jenny M. James

This article considers James Baldwin’s last published novel, Just Above My Head (1979), as the culmination of his exploration of kinship, reflecting on the ways distance and loss characterize African-American familial relations. By analyzing Baldwin’s representation of Hall Montana’s relationship to, and mourning of, his younger brother Arthur, this article argues that JAMH revises the terms of the black family to imagine an alternative, errant kinship that is adoptive, migratory, and sustained through songs of joy and grief. My approach to the novel’s portrayal of kinship is indebted to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990), in which he defines “errantry” as a fundamental characteristic of diaspora that resists the claustrophobic, filial violence and territorial dispossession that are slavery’s legacies. Baldwin represents errant kinship in JAMH through his inclusion of music and formal experimentation. Departing from previous scholarship that reads JAMH as emblematic of the author’s artistic decline, I interpret the novel’s numerous syntactic and figurative experiments as offering new formal insight into his portrait of brotherly love. Baldwin’s integration of two distinctive leitmotifs, blood and song, is therefore read as a formal gesture toward a more capacious and migratory kinship.

James Baldwin Review
Open Access (free)
James Baldwin’s Pragmatist Aesthetics
Rohan Ghatage

This essay establishes a philosophical connection between James Baldwin and the philosopher William James by investigating how the pragmatist protocol against “vicious intellectualism” offers Baldwin a key resource for thinking through how anti-black racism might be dismantled. While Richard Wright had earlier denounced pragmatism for privileging experience over knowledge, and thereby offering the black subject no means for redressing America’s constitutive hierarchies, uncovering the current of Jamesian thought that runs through Baldwin’s essays brings into view his attempt to move beyond epistemology as the primary framework for inaugurating a future unburdened by the problem of the color line. Although Baldwin indicts contemporaneous arrangements of knowledge for producing the most dehumanizing forms of racism, he does not simply attempt to rewrite the enervating meanings to which black subjects are given. Articulating a pragmatist sensibility at various stages of his career, Baldwin repeatedly suggests that the imagining and creation of a better world is predicated upon rethinking the normative value accorded to knowledge in the practice of politics. The provocative challenge that Baldwin issues for his reader is to cease the well-established privileging of knowledge, and to instead stage the struggle for freedom within an aesthetic, rather than epistemological, paradigm.

James Baldwin Review
Swati Mehta Dhawan
and
Julie Zollmann

Humanitarian actors touting financial inclusion posit that access to financial services builds refugees’ resilience and self-reliance. They claim that new digital financial tools create more efficient and dignified pathways for humanitarian assistance and enable refugees to better manage their savings and invest in livelihoods, especially during protracted displacement. Our in-depth, repeat interviews with refugees in Kenya and Jordan refute this narrative. Instead, self-reliance was hindered primarily by refugees’ lack of foundational rights to move and work. Financial services had limited ability to support livelihoods in the absence of those rights. The digital financial services offered to refugees under the banner of ‘financial inclusion’ were not mainstream services designed to empower and connect. Instead, they were segregated, second-class offerings meant to further isolate and limit refugee transactions in line with broader political desires to encamp and exclude them. The article raises questions about the circumstances in which humanitarian funding ought to fund financial service interventions and what those interventions are capable of achieving.

Journal of Humanitarian Affairs
Catherine Akurut

continuation of patriarchy, which as Holter (1997 : 839) defines, is the ‘long-term structure of the subordination of women’. Ward believes this affects the decade-long endeavours to obtain gender equality by the feminists’ movement. While extending services designed for women to men is better than offering no services, it is problematic and fails to consider what genuinely gender-inclusive programming would look like. This reveals a blind spot regarding gender

Journal of Humanitarian Affairs
Open Access (free)
Phoebe Shambaugh
and
Bertrand Taithe

responsibility, and innovative turns in celebrity humanitarianism. As such, in addition to offering an introduction to debates around development, conflict and celebrity humanitarianism in the Congo, the paper also illustrates the function of debate and response in academic knowledge production. Bringing together such diverse disciplinary and political perspectives on the topic highlights some of the tensions, but also the gaps and assumptions which lubricate research in our field. The second

Journal of Humanitarian Affairs
Open Access (free)
Bridging Ethical Divides in Digital Refugee Livelihoods
Evan Easton-Calabria

refugees seeking work in the digital economy, yet refugees generally find themselves post-training competing alone for small-scale gig contracts. Risks lie in a range of areas, including indecent work, risks to health and safety, scams and fraud, and possible debt accrued through unpaid time or buying equipment for digital work that does not appear ( Rushworth and Hackl, 2022 ). At the very least, organisations offering digital trainings to refugees should engage

Journal of Humanitarian Affairs
Corporations, Celebrities and the Construction of the Entrepreneurial Refugee Woman
Annika Bergman Rosamond
and
Catia Gregoratti

( Prügl, 2015 ; Roberts, 2015 ), habitually diagnose deficiencies and devise interventions to bring about improvements. The offering of such problem representations, moreover, rarely attends to the power relations that are reproduced when the other’s story is reinterpreted and simplified to fit within logics and finalities of improvement schemes ( Li, 2007 ). It is not uncommon for humanitarian actors seeking to empower women beyond borders to engage in

Journal of Humanitarian Affairs