Note: in spring 2025 Narrative Lab student research fellows were asked to develop a research prospectus that describes a project that they might undertake, its rationale, scope, and methods. This example was written by Coco Zhang.
Narrative is the lens through which I understand the world: collective memories behind public statues, ideological quarrels on social media, and recollection of trauma in talk therapy. My fellowship at Mellon / TSSL Narrative Lab empowered me to understand the rigid yet malleable discipline of narrative studies and its real world application. After diving into various narrative frameworks with professors and fellows at weekly roundtables, I oriented my personal project around rhetorical and applied narrative studies due to my interest in public discourses. As an enthusiast of fiction, media, and policy, I cherished the opportunity to investigate in narrative, a meta-framework that is applicable to all these texts. My personal project will explore the narrative space in the field of humanitarianism with reference to a contemporary multimedia corpora.
Taking great interest in global politics, peace, and conflict, I have naturally fallen into the identity of being a humanitarian. My younger self took a simple conviction in caring for a shared humanity and acting for global equality. This belief carried me through high school where many of my friends identified themselves as refugees — exiles from their ancestral homeland and youngsters separated from their families. We spent so much time drinking chai, racing into the sea, talking under the stars that I misconceived humanitarianism as a heartfelt companionship and an idyllic lifestyle.
The realpolitik of humanitarianism I learned from university classrooms alerted me of its untested normative values. Who are humanitarians? What do they care for? Where does their work end? Historical documents such as the International Red Cross Committee’s 1921 statutes canonised fundamental humanitarian principles, which includes humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence. The Sphere Handbook over the last two decades informs aid providers of a number-informed minimum standard of living. Despite consistent efforts for standardisation, the principles and handbooks still miss out on a series of self-identified values and historical dynamics. By acting as humanitarians and speaking for the sector, we actively contribute to the narrative space of humanitarianism.
Modern humanitarianism came out of colonialism and missionaries, becoming formalised through international organisations and conventions during the two World Wars. Through globalisation and decolonisation efforts, humanitarians have institutionalised in the Global North to create emergency response to underdeveloped regions, without acknowledgement for the cause of disparity. Former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, famously claimed that “there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian crises,” which criticises the insufficiency of foreign aid in engaging with the multi-faceted reality of assisted states. (Ogata, 2) Public figures from developing countries, such as former Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, separate their political stance from global humanitarianism and work towards independence from foreign aid, a distributive rather than co-prosperous system. (Kwama)
The idea of an institutional master narrative in humanitarianism struck me during a presentation by a former USAID policymaker on localisation, a sector goal recognised in the last ten years. She defined the localisation agenda with a mission to “shift power and resources towards local actors” through actions such as “empowering local champions” and “delegating funds to local organisations”. (Hans) The vocabulary threw me off with institutions as agents and “locals” as recipients whose men and resources are disposable. Instead of crisis-affected areas, humanitarians still instrumentalise the sector with themselves as the agenda-setter and decision-maker. With a room of nodding humanitarians, I was shocked by how self-identified humanitarians like us always align with institutional power through the language of centralisation, hierarchy, and productivity. This brought me to dissect humanitarian narratives narrated by humanitarians, a diverse group of policy-makers, scholars, journalists, technologists eager to make changes for global humanity. Rimmon-Keenan’s approach to structural narratology suggests us to look for the focaliser, a “sustained inside view”, behind these texts and images — foreign institutions of power. (Rimmon-Kenan, 78) Institutions such as the UN don’t narrate for themselves but speak through stakeholders in the sector. Through close analysis on short humanitarian narratives, this research project investigates how a humanitarian consolidates their mission under an institutional master narrative, which interplays with the rigidity in the international humanitarian system.
I would like to first address a gap in the humanitarian literature for a corpus of narratives and discourses. The humanitarian narrative defined as stories told by humanitarians come in various forms through journalism, fiction, and public speaking, which speaks to various audiences of donor institutions, the public, etc. One of the prerequisites of this research is to define humanitarian narrative and its formation through finding a group of texts that are 1) machine-readable, 2) representative, 3) samplable, 4) authentic. (McEnery et al., 8) To start my journey on this ambitious pathway, I would like to first choose a few sites of humanitarian narratives on the internet, and build close-reading and computational analysis upon them. I would like to apply a rhetorical framework to my primary corpus and dissect them as a communication, which underscores the question of who the texts are speaking to. (Phelan, 2) To diversify the mediums of communication behind these texts, I’m interested in starting my secondary research with the following genres: 1) APP UI/UX design, 2) public policy, and 3) journalism. To cover narrators with diverse functions and incentives in the sector, I aim to scope and sample multi-medium texts that are relevant and authentic for close analysis. The project will be delivered and presented in two formats – an academic paper and an interactive website. The prior anchors the structured methodology and findings of this research project for academic purposes. With sections including data visualisation and corpus references, the website can provide creative contributions to the humanitarian narrative space by crediting important communities and actively joining the discourses.
Work Cited
“10th International Conference of the Red Cross, Geneva, 1921.” https://archives.ungeneva.org/10th-international-conference-of-the-red-cross-geneva-1921
Hans, Ananta. Localization, 28 Apr. 2025, D-Lab, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Joy Kwama. (2025, January 29). Uhuru Challenges Kenyans After Trump Removes USAID Funding.https://thekenyatimes.com/latest-kenya-times-news/why-are-you-crying-uhuru-responds-to-kenyans-over-trump-order/
Phelan. (2018). “Authors, Resources, Audiences: Toward a Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative,” Style, 52(1–2), 1. https://doi.org/10.5325/style.52.1-2.0001
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. “Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.” Routledge, 2002.
Sadako Ogata. (2005, March 14). “The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crisis of the 1990s,” interview by Thalif Deen and Evelyn Leopold, World Chronicle, No. 970
Tony McEnery, Richard Xiao, Yukio Tono. (2008). “Corpus-based language studies: An advanced resource book,” Routledge.