PhD Thesis
Provisional PhD Thesis Title: Knowing Famine: Practices of Humanitarian Knowledge Production
PhD Supervisor: Anna Leander, Julie Billaud (Co-supervisors)
Expected Completion Date: Spring 2025
This research looks at the production of knowledge on famine and food security. The study aims to denaturalize our understanding of famine, showing how it is constructed as an object of knowledge and intervention through contingent practices. This analysis highlights how power operates through seemingly neutral technical practices and how our ways of knowing, defining, and classifying famine shape our responses to food crises. Adopting a multi-sited ethnographic approach that draws on participant observations, key informant and life history interviews, and documents, this study traces the sites, practices, and people that are brought together around famine and food security, and the various coordinating structures through which they are engaged. An inquiry into how famine is produced, in theory and in practice, is important given persistent logics of scarcity mobilized in humanitarian action. Humanitarian organizations warn of exponentially higher levels of humanitarian needs globally and fewer resources to address them. This inquiry is also timely given the international humanitarian system’s current grappling with matters of power, politics, and ways of knowing. This research contributes to critical literature on humanitarian numbers, humanitarian governance, and everyday humanitarianism with conceptual and methodological inspiration from STS.
Profile
Hayley Umayam joins the Graduate Institute after six years working as a researcher in East Africa, which included applied research and M&E in the humanitarian and development sectors. Hayley collaborates on research projects related to knowledge, expertise, and global governance, such an FDFA-funded study on the use of scientific knowledge at the UN Security Council (2022). Hayley holds a M.A. in Peace and Justice Studies from the University of San Diego, where she currently teaches a graduate course on Humanitarian Program Design, Monitoring and Evaluation.
Research Interests
- Humanitarian governance
- Famine Studies
South Sudan
Publications and Works
- Umayam, H. (2024) Another Thing We Know About Humanitarian Numbers. Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, DOI: https://doi.org/10.7227/JHA.117
- Umayam, H. and Niederberger, A. (2024) Science and Technology at the United Nations Security Council (Part 2): Cybersecurity and New Technologies. The Global Governance Centre.
- Niederberger, A. and Umayam, H. (2024) Science and Technology at the United Nations Security Council (Part 1): Leveraging Diplomacy with Science. The Global Governance Centre.