This article brings to light a subject of supreme importance to the International Relations (IR) academic community on critical research. Much like any IR critical approach, an analysis of the visual politics of human suffering through epistemological and methodological premises is defined by postpositivist and praxeological accounts. The question of relevance of this article for the IR critical theory is, therefore, the framing of a phronetic perspective provided by post-positivism and the logic of enactment provided by praxeology as integral parts of a reflexive reading over visual politics of suffering and its constitutive power of mediation. By establishing these epistemological and methodological premises, it contributes to critical evaluations about mediation and existing structures of power. For this, it considers an emancipatory commitment, so the naturalness notion of the international structure and the traditional relations of dominance and struggle for power would be challenged. In bonding different IR approaches, such as constructivist, post-structuralist, feminists, and others alike together into the same epistemological and methodological accounts, IR critical theory becomes the main counter-argument provided by this article in attempting to resist rational positions that determine whose suffering human beings see, and whose suffering tends to remain unseen to them.
This study relies on the video method and the roundtable technique to discuss audience’s ways of thinking about the sea rescue cause in the Central Mediterranean. After presenting a self-made video containing interviews with two members of a non-profit organization that conducts search and rescue operations of migrant boats on the Central Mediterranean Sea to a small sample size of participants, a roundtable discussion was held to debate their ways of thinking in relation to the sea rescue cause. In sharing video-based messages delivered by activists/humanitarian workers with a target audience, a discussion was initiated to explore some arguments, insights and assessments. Results showed a sense of frustration among participants and concerns about notions of legality vs illegality, individual vs collective responsibility, prosocial behavior, “limited” engagement, and perceiving the migration situation as an emergency. These results are further discussed in this study, and they not only contribute to a more comprehensive evaluation of audience responses to rescue operations of migrant boats in distress at high sea, but also suggest lines for future research about the role played by the video method and the roundtable technique in engaging people to debate human rights issues and humanitarian causes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.