Browsing by Subject "humanitarian communication"

This study explores how the representation of homeless people is constructed in charity appeals drawing on the example of Nochlezhka, the leading homelessness charity in Russia. Nochlezhka is not only a shelter providing immediate help but also an NGO with a wide range of activities, including advocacy, consultancy and resocialization of the homeless. International recognition of its achievements and its prominent work offered a necessary basis for situating the organization as the subject of a case study. Two factors which have driven the researcher’s interest in the chosen topic are the recent development of the charity sector in Russia and the appalling number of homeless people in the country. Mainstream representations of homelessness tend to present stereotypical images of urban others, reducing them to a set of stable characteristics, often negative in their nature. In other words, homeless people subjected to othering, and their difference becomes fixed to the state of being unsettled. Being homeless is then associated with being dirty, drunk, and completely degraded. Such preexisting attitudes towards homeless people problematize their representation for charity purposes. The aim of this study is to understand how the appeals on homelessness are reaching the potential sea of donors, considering that they are making a proposal to help those who are generally not considered to be an object for help. The thesis relies on the theory of representation and the area of media research which studies humanitarian communication and its ethical implications. The former examines how the other is portrayed and discusses stereotyping practices on the general level. The latter draws on paradoxes of the particular styles and differentiates three ways of formulating a charity appeal: shock-effect appeal, deliberative positivism and post-humanitarian or reflexive appeals. A critical discourse approach was chosen to study how appeals construe certain ways of representing the world and the actors in it. In order to examine the different semiotic modes (e.g. verbal and visual) of appeals the methods of multimodal analysis were employed. The analysis shows that rather than represent homeless people and their struggles in a shocking or exaggeratedly positive way, Nochlezhka balances a reflexive style of appealing and a tendency to represent the homeless through their own narration. The charity employs strategies of nomination and cultural estrangement, while the aesthetical power of appeals is realized through the means of multimodal metaphors. Assigning homeless people with their names works as an antidote to the conventional impersonalization of this social group. Representing the loneliness in their campaigns, Nochlezhka replaces the raw reality of suffering with a significant and universal human experience. The decision to communicate the fragility of human life through the theme of illness also points to the broader discourse of social insecurity.