בין סיכון לאי-ודאות: ידע, מדע וטכנולוגיה

Among the recent surge of interest in technological innovation in humanitarianism, crisis mapping stands out as a particularly promising avenue for creating both better situation awareness in disasters and stronger bonds of solidarity among distant strangers. Since its breakthrough in the 2010 Haiti earthquake, when thousands of volunteers mobilized to aggregate, translate, and plot on maps the victims’ pleas for help, crisis mapping has been integrated into existing mechanisms of emergency response and supplemented with a host of new technological devices. This paper looks critically at the political implications of this widely celebrated practice, while dwelling on the kinds of cosmopolitan publics that it purports to forge by mobilizing crowdsourced analysis of social media data as a means for disaster management. While crisis mapping may be seen as an appealing alternative to the spectatorship of distant suffering, with its attendant separation of seeing and acting and its denigrating image of disaster affected populations, what exactly are the forms of public participation that it fosters and what is the vision of political life they sustain? The paper makes two related arguments that point to the need to examine this form of participatory humanitarianism with extreme caution. First, I argue that crisis mapping ultimately works to make disaster affected populations more resilient, thereby absolving states and the international community from their responsibility to act more resolutely against the root causes of disasters. Second, I claim that in creating a network of mutually isolated individuals who are connected through standardized gestures of data analysis, crisis mapping depletes the transformative energies of global publics.