Thematic Focus: Celebrity Advocacy

While Angelina Jolie currently reigns as the most famous "star" associated with refugees, this World Refugee Day, UNHCR has called on a wide variety of other well-known people to voice their support for refugees through video messages, photos of themselves with their "most important things", and lots of tweets.

Several recent publications take an academic look at the role played by celebrities in human rights and humanitarian activism and charity work:

"The Celebritization of Human Trafficking," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (forthcoming, 2013) [eprint via SSRN]
- See also related blog post.

Celebrity Humanitarianism The Ideology of Global Charity (Routledge, Oct. 2012) [info]
- See also debate, book review, and author comment.

"'Getting in Touch with Your Inner Angelina': Celebrity Humanitarianism and the Cultural Politics of Gendered Generosity in Volunteer Tourism," Third World Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 3 (2013) [abstract]
- An earlier version of this paper was presented at an AAG conference session on "Celebrity, Media and Vital Causes."

"The Long Shadow of Band Aid Humanitarianism: Revisiting the Dynamics between Famine and Celebrity," Third World Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 3 (2013) [abstract]

[Image credit: ©UNHCR/O.Laban-Mattei, "Angelina Jolie visits Syrian border," UNHCR, 19 June 2013]

Tagged Publications.