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Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the workings of the humanitarian impulse and desires in a unique context of a touristic vaccine trial. Through this, it explores contemporary, changing forms of humanitarian desires, actions and subjectivities and asks, how the ethical, affective and epistemic are intertwined.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the workings of the humanitarian impulse in a unique context of a touristic vaccine trial conducted in Western Africa. Such a context enables addressing the interweaving of different forms of subjectivity - humanitarian, scientific and touristic - and the ways these are constitutive of each other and particular forms of knowledge and action.

This paper draws on field research (2017-2019) on a Nordic based vaccine study aiming to test a vaccine against diarrhea. The vaccine study was conducted in Western Africa (2017-2019), and if successful, the vaccine is said to be intended for both, travelers and children under five in developing countries. This paper demonstrates how the humanitarian impulse is at work on different scales, those of individual(ized) desires to help and institutionalized forms of scientific knowledge production, and how these scales are intertwined. The paper analyses the 'transformation' of a medical study into charity activities, small scale aid initiatives and continuous flow of goods and equipment.

In addition to ethical and affective impasses (Malkki 2015), this paper addresses epistemic ones encountered by 'humanitarian subjects'. This paper underlines that to better understand and engage with the questions of ethics and politics of this form of knowledge production, one needs to engage with the broader notions of humanitarian interests and impulses; and to comprehend the workings of the humanitarian impulse, one needs to be attentive of the very private desires (to know, to help) of ordinary people as well as such more institutional scenes as scientific knowledge production.