Commodifying Compassion - Final Conference

Today's marketplace is inundated with products supporting humanitarian causes that promise to give aid to beneficiaries, provide ´good feelings´ to consumers and promote the brands of corporations and humanitarian NGOs. The commodification of humanitarianism is thus linked to the privatization of help with significant and as of yet poorly understood consequences. Commodifying Compassion (CoCo) research project (2017-2023), funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research, has aimed to open this "black box" of privatized humanitarianism, asking how ´helping´ has become a marketable commodity and how this impacts humanitarianism symbolically and materially.

To further explore these questions, we welcome you to the final conference of our research project: Commodifying Compassion: Implications of Turning People and Humanitarian Causes into Marketable Things held on the 2nd of May 2023 at Copenhagen Business School. Our CoCo research team will share their findings, and we will be hearing keynote presentations from Amal Hassan Fadlalla (University of Michigan) Michael Barnett (George Washington University) and Dan Brockington (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).