The Neoliberal Politics of Celebrity Humanitarianism

Public lecture with Professor Lisa Ann Richey. The lecture is a part of the international conference on Celebrity and Protest in Africa and in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle at the University of Copenhagen.

At the intersection between culture and formal politics, celebrities working for humanitarian causes have become proxy philanthropists, statesmen, executives and healers. Humanitarianism itself is an increasingly professionalized field of generic technicians who have replaced caring volunteers. In contrast, celebrities are extraordinary, not generic, and their skills are to perform caring involvement.

Celebrities are part and parcel of the elite nature of the politics of North-South relations. Instead of bringing in popular voices to participate in more democratic distributions of power, celebrities are brought in instead.

Celebrities don’t mobilize the public. They replace the public. In this talk, I will describe a heuristic typology of celebrity humanitarianism and its politics. This talk will engage work on the politics of celebrity humanitarian relations moving away from merely focusing on Northern politics to identify what sorts of politics and political solutions are being advocated by current forms of celebrity humanitarianism. This approach allows us to describe a global neoliberal politics of celebrity humanitarianism.

Lisa Ann Richey
Lisa Ann Richey is Professor of Globalization at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. She is the author of the books 'Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World' with Stefano Ponte (2011), 'Population Politics and Development: From the Policies to the Clinics' (2008), co-editor with Stefano Ponte of 'New Actors and Alliances in Development' (2014), and editor of 'Celebrity Humanitarianism' and 'North-South Relations: Politics, Place and Power' (2016).

She works in the areas of international aid and humanitarian politics, the aid business, new transnational actors and alliances in the global South, development theories and representations, global health and gender. Currently, she leads the research project on Commodifying Compassion: Implications of Turning People and Humanitarian Causes into Marketable Things (2016-2020), funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research.