Beyond “Emergencies?" Reporting on Humanitarian Issues Around the World

Dr Kate Wright, Academic Lead of the Media and Communications Research Cluster at EFI, has just published a lead-authored article challenging a pre-eminent and longstanding theory in the field of humanitarian communication. The article, 'Beyond Emergencies? Reporting on Humanitarian Issues Around the World', is the first large-scale, empirical study to systematically test the presence and geographic distribution of what was previously hailed as the “master” interpretive frame, the emergency imaginary, within the media coverage of humanitarian affairs.

To do this, Dr Wright and her co-authors, Dani Madrid-Morales (University of Sheffield) and Christopher Barrie (New York University), used an innovative blend of computational and manual methods to analyse a specially constructed corpus of over a million Anglophone texts, from 582 sources of broadcast, print and online media in 92 countries—all of which were produced between 2010 and 2020.

Their results demonstrate that the emergency imaginary did dominate a cluster of countries where English is the primary language, but media elsewhere tended to hybridise the emergency imaginary with other interpretive frames. So, the paper contests the widely-held belief in humanitarian communication that media coverage enabled the emergency imaginary to spread from “the West” to dominate the conceptualisation of humanitarianism world-wide. The paper is published in the top-ranked Communication journal, Digital Journalism (H index 84).

In the early stages of her work on this project, Kate drew on CDCS support and training to develop her understanding of, and skills in, coding and corpus analysis. This not only expanded the possibilities of her research, but also help her to employ and supervise an RA to help construct the global media corpus. In 2024, she and Dr Madrid-Morales received the award for "Best Dataset" at the CDCS Digital Research Prizes; the research team also received a high commendation for ‘Best Small Data-Driven Project.”

“I’ve been researching humanitarian issues for the past fifteen years but have always traditional qualitative methods in the social sciences. Without the encouragement, training and funding provided by CDCS over three years, I would not have been able to branch out in this way, nor would I have felt confident partnering with computational colleagues to develop new cutting-edge mixed methods. I would have just stuck to what I knew, to be honest. It was also CDCS’ support on this project, and the network of scholars that grew from it, which encouraged me to move forward into studying Responsible AI as part of the Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) scheme.” - Dr Kate Wright