Acts Of Conspicuous Compassion

Illuminates the relationship between performance and the American charity movement

Argues that public displays of empathy, such as the wearing of ribbons, is more about projecting one's ego, and not really about doing good.

A stirring and sobering diagnosis of the challenges that confront anyone laboring to renew America’s tradition of ordered liberty. Classicist Bruce Thornton’s Plagues of the Mind is a forceful vindication of the West’s tradition of rational, critical inquiry—a legacy now largely jettisoned in favor of a host of new deities, environmentalism, feminism, primitivism, New Age, and the cult of the therapeutic among them.

Experts increasingly recognise that our volatile, complex, and fragile world requires a new type of leadership. More than ever, we need leaders who understand how compassion connects them with their employees, stakeholders and wider communities. Yet compassion in organisations is often misunderstood, with many leaders reluctant to embrace it lest they appear weak. Compassionate Leadership draws on new and established research in psychology, behavioural science, neuropsychology and leadership theory to show that compassion, when correctly understood and applied is, in fact, a formidable and sustainable force for positive leadership. This book explores the common myths, pitfalls, and concerns about leading with a compassionate approach. It discusses the leadership, organisational and individual benefits of compassion and shows how leaders can design an organisation which establishes, then reinforces, a compassionate culture. A practical guide, this book provides evidence-based tools, appraisals, and frameworks which emphasise everyday applications that leaders, managers, and business students can adopt both individually and for their organisations. Compassionate Leadership presents a new model of compassion, an approach based on multidisciplinary research in a variety of organisational settings. It gives leaders a theoretical and practical underpinning they can use for deeper reflection and personal growth to turn their new-found knowledge into action.

Citizen Aid and Everyday Humanitarianism brings together, under the umbrella terms of citizen aid and grassroots humanitarianism, interdisciplinary research on small-scale, privately-funded forms of aid that operate on the margins of the official development sector. The last decade has seen a steady rise of such activities in the Global South and North, such as in response to the influx of refugees into Europe. The chapters in this volume cover a variety of locations in Asia, Africa and Europe, presenting empirically grounded cases of citizen aid. They range from educational development projects, to post-disaster emergency relief. Importantly, while some activities are initiated by Northern citizens, others are based on South–South assistance, such as Bangladeshi nationals supporting Rohingya refugees, and peer support in the Philippines in the aftermath of typhoon Hayan. Together, the contributions consider citizen aid vis-à-vis more institutionalised forms of aid, review methodological approaches and their challenges and query the political dimensions of these initiatives. Key themes are historical perspectives on ‘demotic humanitarianism’, questions of legitimacy and professionalisation, founders’ motivations, the role of personal connections, and the importance of digital media for brokerage and fundraising. Being mindful of the power imbalances inherent in citizen aid and everyday humanitarianism, they suggest that both deserve more systematic attention. Citizen Aid and Everyday Humanitarianism will be of great interest to scholars and professionals working in international development, humanitarianism, international aid and anthropology. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Advertising Disability invites Cultural Disability Studies to consider how advertising, as one of the most ubiquitous forms of popular culture, shapes attitudes towards disability. The research presented in the book provides a much-needed examination of the ways in which disability and mental health issues are depicted in different types of advertising, including charity 'sadvertisements', direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements and 'pro-diversity' brand campaigns. Textual analyses of advertisements from the eighteenth century onwards reveal how advertising reinforces barriers facing disabled people, such as stigmatising attitudes, ableist beauty 'ideals', inclusionism and the unstable crutch of charity. As well as investigating how socio-cultural meanings associated with disability are influenced by multimodal forms of communication in advertising, insights from empirical research conducted with disabled women in the United Kingdom and the United States are provided. Moving beyond traditional textual approaches to analysing cultural representations, the book emphasises how disabled people and activists develop counternarratives informed by their personal experiences of disability, challenging ableist messages promoted by advertisements. From start to finish, activist concepts developed by the Disabled People's Movement and individuals' embodied knowledge surrounding disability, impairments and mental health issues inform critiques of advertisements. Its critically informed approach to analysing portrayals of disability is relevant to advertisers, scholars and students in advertising studies and media studies who are interested in portraying diversity in marketing and promotional materials as well as scholars and students of disability studies and sociology more broadly.

This book questions the reliance on melodrama and spectacle in social performances and cultural productions by and about migrants from Mexico and Central America to the United States. Focusing on archetypal characters with nineteenth-century roots that recur in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries – heroic saviors, saintly mothers and struggling fathers, martyred children and rebellious youth – it shows how theater practitioners, filmmakers, visual artists, advocates, activists, journalists, and others who want to help migrants often create migrant melodramas, performances that depict their heroes as virtuous victims at the mercy of evil villains. In order to gain respect for the human rights that are supposedly already theirs on paper and participate in a global market that trades in performances of suffering, migrants themselves sometimes accept the roles into which they are cast, or even cast themselves. Some express their suffering publicly, often on demand. Others find ways to twist, parody, resist, or reject migrant melodrama. Timely, beautifully written, and deeply researched, Puga’s and Espinosa’s study captures the complex nuances of how performance scholars and ethnographers grapple with telling stories of and bearing witness to trauma. They invite scholars to re-imagine the narrative genres into which histories of migration are often coerced. They question how familiar forms such as melodrama can empower or dis-empower individuals struggling to share their stories and change their circumstances. Their thoughtful work offers a compassionate and erudite model for performance ethnographers. Heather S. Nathans Alice and Nathan Gantcher Professor in Judaic Studies Tufts University In their penetrating analysis, Puga and Espinosa show how militarized borders, neoliberal economics, exclusionary immigration policies, and rising nativism have combined to create an ongoing melodrama in which migrants, journalists, and rescuers perform scripted roles as martyrs, saints, and heroes in an effort to sway a global audience of onlookers. Although the protagonists in this melodrama seek to relieve the suffering of migrants by valorizing their pain and using it as a currency in a political economy of suffering, the authors’ sympathetic but critical analysis reveals both the promise and perils of this emotive strategy. Their analysis is essential to understanding how immigration is portrayed and perceived in the world today. Douglas S. Massey Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs Princeton University Ana Elena Puga and Víctor M. Espinosa’s Performances of Suffering is well-researched and compellingly theorized collaboration which reveals the affective labor performed by, with and for migrants in the United States and Mexico. In these perilous times, the lessons that this book teaches us about the performance of melodrama as a key aspect of obtaining justice and care for migrants throughout the hemisphere are crucial to understanding representations of “migrant crises” in our contemporary social media, performance and advocacy movements. Patricia Ybarra Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Brown University In this fascinating book, Puga and Espinosa illuminate the political economy of suffering among Latin American migrants. This is a timely and important work to understand how migrants, the state, humanitarian workers, and the media all perform the melodrama of the suffering migrant. An impressive and provocative book! Carolyn Chen Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies University of California at Berkeley

Performing Anti-Slavery demonstrates how black and white abolitionist women transformed antebellum performance practice into a critique of state violence.