Abstract
This presentation poses questions about the intricacy of what it means to be a ‘humane practitioner’. Drawing on recent research with of a group of Western Australian practitioners working in international development, disaster relief, remote medical work, and refugee rights activism, this presentation examines how narratives from various iterations of humanitarian work illuminate the contingency and ambivalence present in professions from which simplistic and often heroic narrative accounts commonly emerge. The exploration of these narratives seeks to search out a language for the set of paradoxes that come with living and working in the complex zones of encounter which characterise much humanitarian endeavour. These include a wrestling with intractable political and development challenges while finding meaning in individual acts, expressions of feeling powerless in situations where people objectively hold much privilege, questions about the role of westerners in complex non-western environments while still choosing to continue to be involved, and the struggle to find vocational and relational identity back at ‘home’. Drawing also on the work of Behrooz Boochani - Iranian poet, journalist, and former immigration detainee - the research explores the way in which humanitarian endeavours and the narratives emerging from them provide an opening to frame humanitarian action as a series of relational and ethical encounters. These encounters produce much contradiction and opportunity, including an invitation to remain troubled, interrogate our blind spots and motives, turn to others that might previously have been obscured, and to resist taken-for-granted systems and regimes of practice.