Proposal

Sean Watkins

Proposal for final paper

For the paper in this class, I would like to further look into the Medical Foundation’s website. In particular, I would like to examine literature on the image of the other. I think that I have not given enough of a close examination of issues of race, class and gender in my past analysis of the website. I really need to spend the time to go through some of the literature on images and video and how they relate to suffering and the other. Perhaps there will be a lot on this topic, but this would not be an exhaustive list. I plan on simply creating an initial group of sources that can be built upon in my dissertation. In my past research, I have simply looked at the position of the survivors of torture compared to the person asking the questions in the online videos. This has been a somewhat shallow analysis because it has not been informed by past literature and it simply examines the videos as a text without a cultural background. I really need to flesh out some more ideas before I can do both the Medical Foundation and survivors’ justice. In particular, the use of the image as being exploitative and/or empowering is incredibly important for this work. Therefore, the overall goal of this project is to give more depth to the research by opening up a different avenue of analysis. The first book that comes to mind for this project is Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. In it she argues that death and suffering has been intrinsically connected to the image for as long as the technology has existed. I would go far and to argue that suffering has been connected more so to certain types of bodies. In this short paper I would like to do a mini literature review of the available research that deals with the othered body as a site of exploitation. I think this would be useful because it will situate my own research within a larger framework of exploitation. I would like to complicate this by applying it to the images used by nonprofits. When images are ‘exploited’ by nonprofits does it have the same effect? Also, when we add the issue of capital to the equation what happens to this paradigm? Nonprofits must make money in order to survive; does this excuse certain tactics that they use in order to fulfill their need? I think that this type of research connects well to the fundamental tenants of feminist research.

I plan on starting my research with available articles on the image and its use in nonprofit organizations. Obviously this is important because I need to situate issues of representation within the context of the world of nonprofits. I get the feeling that there may not be a lot of research on this area, so I then plan on opening it up to the image of suffering and its use in the market place. It is crucial to keep capitalism in the mix because these organizations need money in order to survive. So, ideally I would use literature on how images are exploited (which is a term that I am not entirely comfortable in using-but haven’t thought of a better one yet) in order to run an organization. Almost every company has to use some sort of image or another to advertise their services, but there are different ways that these images are used. I think that work done on advertising might be helpful here, specifically how women and the other have been depicted in these ads. Also, the suffering of the other as being exploited would also be informative because most of the people on the Medical Foundation website are not white. Interestingly, many of the people that work at the MF are also not white (which may lead to an interesting discussion if I decided to do interviews at the organization for another piece). I think that the several areas above will be more than enough to fill up a paper. My goal is to synthesize these ideas together in order to give myself a good map for future research.