Raymond Apthorpe was one of the first generations of professors of international development studies, at the University of East Anglia 1974-77 and at ISS 1977-87. He has later specialized in humanitarian studies, including at the Australian National University and Cambridge University.

Des Gasper is professor emeritus at ISS, and works on topics in development ethics, global ethics, human development and human insecurity.

They have worked together periodically since the 1970s. In this session they will highlight and discuss some themes and questions that connect their work.

Anthropology is sometimes described as making the strange feel familiar, more understandable. Centrally important too in all social studies and policy studies, including development studies and humanitarian studies, is making what feels familiar feel strange –– so that we become more aware of our assumptions and conventions and blind spots and thus more able to examine, assess and perhaps modify them. Nowadays this de-familiarization is often called “making strange”.

In the first section — Thoughts on Humanitarianism, Ethics, and Development Studies – Gasper suggests that thinking about ‘development ethics’ has arisen, to an important extent, in response to humanitarian crises, like famines. Some related current work in development ethics explores “aporophobia”, fear and hate of the poor. Crises also help to reveal systems, and thus to stimulate social science and development theory more generally. But development theory and development ethics can get frozen in over-simple mental frames, including for example through moral self-righteousness; and, at the same time, getting ethical responsiveness for slow-onset crises appears far harder than for rapid-onset ‘disasters’. Development studies needs then continual ‘making strange’/standing-outside/what-if? thinking, including through use of discourse analysis. And it ‘needs’ the shocks – to perceptual and ethical frames – that crisis- & humanitarian-studies provide.

In the second section, Apthorpe reflects on: Developmentalisms and humanitarianisms made strange – What a touch of discursive analysis can do, when you can’t do anything else.