Provisional PhD Thesis Title: "Seeing Need: Knowledge Production and Reality in Humanitarian Practice”
Expected Completion Date: Spring 2025
This research looks at the production of knowledge on humanitarian need using famine and food security in South Sudan as an entry point. Treating humanitarian need as an object of study, I investigate how different actors enact it in different places and times through different tools, practices, and imaginaries, making humanitarian need a singular object through the social coordination and translation work among all these different things. 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. After describing how the knowledge production process creates an object of humanitarian need, this study also highlights the implications, namely how these processes reshape complex social worlds and what subjectivities emerge. An inquiry into how humanitarian need is produced, in theory and in practice, is important given trends towards exponentially higher levels of humanitarian needs 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 and phenomenology.
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.