By Louis Clayton, Imogen Drury, Eve McLaughlin, Dillon O’Toole Douglas

The humanitarian and development sector have historically relied upon stereotypes of the Global South as automatically vulnerable and helpless. However, in recent years, anthropology has chronicled how promotional materials have progressed to centre the experiences and voices of those they aim to assist. Our activity focuses on displaying how these narratives have changed through time and how the sector has moved from fitting people into a ‘suffering slot’ (Robbins, 2013) to taking seriously the needs of those the organisations endeavour to help.

Through the examples we have sourced, participants will discuss how the approach to promotional posters has changed in the aid and development sector (see Figure 1). After this our participants will be asked to rearrange parts of these promotional posters that we have cut up into different segments (see Figure 2) to create their own. These campaigns will be informed by our discussion of what constitutes ethical representations of those in need. The activity will showcase not only how the approach to promotional material has changed over time, but will also push our participants to reflect on the aid and development sector’s role in creating, often harmful, narratives around those they aim to help.

Figure 1: Campaign posters. 

Figure 2: Materials for collage making. 

One key aspect of these campaigns is the use of language as a way to evoke specific emotions in an audience to bring about collective movement in NGOs. Sara Ahmed’s ideas of collective feelings showcase this idea clearly. She suggests these collective feelings create forward movement (Ahmed, 2004) and talks particularly about the ‘language of pain’ and how it ‘operates through signs’ (p.34). This suggests that pain can be utilised for collective feelings through signposting language. Signposting is used heavily in campaigns for humanitarian work, and so, thinking about Ahmed’s (2004) article and how ‘the individual and collective bodies surface through the very orientations we take to objects and others’ (p.39), suggesting emotions are produced from external symbols to influence an individual. We created an activity that integrated the use of symbols and language in campaigns throughout the years. Through this, our participants will explore the different uses of language and images by NGOs to create specific depictions of individuals in need of aid.

Historically, these depictions by aid campaigns have deliberately used symbols of vulnerability to create an emotional response from their audience and thus mobilise support. Lisa Malkki (2015) explains how this vulnerability was harnessed through the example of the Finnish Red Cross Aid Bunny campaign in 2006. The campaign motivated the public to send bunnies not only by depicting the children as vulnerable and helpless, but also by harnessing the power of the sense of relation to the child that sending a handmade bunny gave. The empathy produced from this campaign was a fundamental mechanism in initiating the audience to engage in the campaign. Emphasising this sense of helplessness, and in this case one’s personal connection to it, creates ‘vehicles for imagining a strong connectedness to the “world out there”’ (Malkki, 2015, p130). Ultimately, the expression of vulnerability creates a means for those participating in campaigns to feel a strong obligation towards supporting those in need.

Vulnerability was not the only aspect focused on in the promotional materials, depicting those in need as victims of suffering was just as common. This central role of suffering, especially in anthropological discourse, was explored by Joel Robbins (2013) as he argued that it is ‘[t]he subject living in pain’ (p.448) that stands at the centre of the discipline’s work. This academic tendency to focus on others’ suffering is mirrored in humanitarian aid campaigns as charities used to overemphasise people’s struggles in a bid to profit upon the empathy that is driven by seeing others suffer. Malkki (1996) also exposes this as she argues that representations of refugees, primarily in visual form, often depict them as a singular suffering body, removing their capacity for agency and hope. Their work is important in highlighting how the sector previously relied upon these harmful tropes but also highlights how they have now improved their approach to better represent those they are aiding, such as having a greater account for their agency and hope. Through discussing these depictions and then using them to create a new campaign, our activity will expose the deliberate use of vulnerability, innocence, and suffering within fundraising campaigns to mobilise support.

The problematic tendency to reduce affected populations to suffering spectacles has not gone unchallenged within development practice. Over time, campaigns have shifted from purely emotional appeals towards approaches that centre community agency and in the Sabar Souchagar Campaign (SSC) in Nadia District, West Bengal. Rather than portraying communities as passive recipients requiring behavioural correction, the campaign’s communication materials framed sanitation as a right and aspiration. For example, slogans like “our latrine our image” and “latrine for all is our right” foregrounded that these communities were active agents demanding entitlements, not objects of charity (Tacchi et al., p.55 2020). In particular, Tacchi et al. found that marginalised communities were already receptive to latrines; the main problem was financial access not cultural resistance. This highlights the core assumptions that decorate many Western campaigns that portray poverty as a deficient mindset rather than a structural condition. When promotional strategies operate under this assumption, they reinforce the stereotype of aid workers as knowledgeable and recipients as ignorant. Our activity will expose how the sector has learned from these mistakes. For example, because of the SSC’s approach of listening and responding to the impacted community, the Nadia district became India’s first 100 per cent Open Defecation Free district in April 2015 just 18 months after the campaign launch (Tacchi et al., 2020).

Our activity will allow our participants to visualise the progression of anthropological thought alongside its practical applications in the aid and development sector. Over time, promotional posters have progressed from the use of signposting language to reduce individuals to stereotypes to garner sympathy to a more inclusive approach in which the voices of those being represented are displayed. By creating their own posters, based upon pre-existing campaigns, we will highlight the responsibility placed on aid organisations to publicise the stories of people who they perhaps have never met.

Bibliography

Ahmed, S. (2004). ‘Collective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others’. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(2), 25-42.

Malkki, L.H. (1996). ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, 11(3), pp. 377-404. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/656300 [Date Accessed: 13 April 2026]

Malkki, L.H. (2015) ‘Bear Humanity: Children, Animals, and Other Power Objects of the Humanitarian Imagination’, in The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism. New York: Duke University Press, pp. 105–132

Robbins, (2013). ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Towards an Anthropology of the Good’ in Journal of the Royal Anthropology Institute, 19(3), pp. 447–462.

Tacchi, J., Chandola, T., Pavarala, V. and Elessawi, R. (2020) ‘Exploring sanitation: participatory research design and ethnography in West Bengal’, in Noske-Turner, J. (ed.) Communication for Development: An Evaluation Framework in Action. London: Practical Action Publishing, pp. 53-71.

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