Book Launch: “Aid and ID: Making People Matter”
On September 16, the MERL Tech Initiative’s Humanitarian AI+MERL Learning Group will host Margie Cheesman alongside book contributors for the official launch of “Aid and ID: Making People Matter.” At the book launch, attendees will hear more from Margie about why and how ID brings the humanitarian sector’s wider dilemmas into focus, taking stock of challenges and possibilities ahead. Attendees will also get a preview of some of the chapters with lightning talks from practitioners who contributed to the book, before a moderated discussion and audience Q+A.
In the new open-access book “Aid and ID: Making People Matter”, editor Margie Cheesman brings together key humanitarian practitioners to reflect on the most crucial of these systems: identity management. Drawing on their own experiences with the real-world complexities of identification in the humanitarian space, twelve experts provide critical new insight into how humanitarian principles and operational pragmatism produce new forms of politics and power to re-shape humanitarian work in practice. The collection also looks forward; asking what humanitarian organisations should prioritise as they rethink identity management in a time of severe funding pressures and renewed demands for efficiency.