In this episode we talk to historian Anelise Hanson Shrout about her fascinating new book Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the rise of transnational philanthropy. Including:

• Was the global philanthropic response to the Irish famine unprecedented at that point?
• Is the response best explained by the fact the famine was able to act as an “empty signifier” which allowed a wide range of groups to interpret the situation according to their own worldview and to imbue their giving with different meaning?
• Is this something we still see in transnational philanthropy today?
• To what extent did the severity of the famine shift emphasis onto more immediate pragmatic responses and away from radical calls for political reform?
• Was support for Irish famine relief in England driven by genuine concern for the plight of the Irish or by fears of mass migration to English cities?
• How important in the debates about famine relief was the distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” recipients?
• To what extent did the Irish Famine lead the US to consider responsibilities to the wider world? Was this sense of globalism/humanitarianism new at this point?
• How did both enslaved people and slave owners in the US respond to the Irish famine?
• Were there debates at the time about the ethics of accepting donations from slave owners, or did the severity of the famine force people into adopting a purely pragmatic approach?
• Did the Irish famine prove particularly useful to slaveowners as a means of demonstrating their own humanity and moral worth through philanthropy?
• How did some enslaved people use philanthropic donations towards famine relief in Ireland to assert their own agency and humanity?
• Should this be understood solely as a political act of “philanthropy-as-resistance”, or was there some element of empathy or solidarity in it?
• How was the news of donations by enslaved people greeted by slaveowners and by white Americans more broadly? Did they try to ignore it, or interpret it according to their own worldviews (and if so, how?)
• How should we understand the gifts made by people from the Cherokee and Choctaw Nations to Irish famine relief?

Related links

• Anelise’s Book
• Anelise’s website
• Anelise’s 2015 paper, “A "Voice of Benevolence from the Western Wilderness": The Politics of Native Philanthropy in the Trans-Mississippi West”
• Bates College article about Anelise and her book
• WPM article, “Cold as Charity: philanthropy and the notion of the “undeserving poor”
• Philanthropisms episodes on tainted donations and disaster response philanthropy
• Philanthropisms interviews with Tyrone McKinley Walker, Maribel Morey and Ben Soskis

In this episode we hear from author Amy Schiller about her fascinating and thought provoking new book The Price of Humanity: How philanthropy went wrong and how to fix it. Including:

• Has our understanding of philanthropy has become too centred on the idea that it is solely about funding things that make human life possible, rather than those that make it worthwhile?
• Is there a danger that philanthropy which becomes too focussed on seeing human life in terms of basic existence ends up “othering” poor people and seeing them as a distinct group (to be pitied/helped), and thereby dehumanises them?
• Is it difficult to argue for the value of beauty, love, transcendent experience etc in a philanthropy and nonprofit sector that has becoming increasingly technocratic and instrumentalist?
• What is the Aristotelean notion of magnificence, and why should philanthropy embrace it?
• Is there any danger that in emphasising philanthropy’s role in funding the transcendent we allow wealthy people off the hook for their responsibilities to society and just allow them to donate to what they wanted to anyway?
• The book argues that we should not view philanthropy as something which backfills or replaces state provision, and that in an ideal world, basic welfare needs would be met by the state and philanthropy would then focus on things that add value to human life above and beyond bare existence. In the present we still seem quite far from that, however, so does philanthropy also need to play a role bringing this ideal world about? (And does this take short-term precedence over it funding things that are transcendent? Or do we need to do both?)
• Why were justice and inequality-centred arguments against the philanthropic response to the Notre Dame fire potentially misguided?
• Are current paradigms of measurement in philanthropy and the non-profit world too focussed on economic utility as the core criterion?
• The book argues for the idea of a “giving wage” – why is it so important that universal state support factors in the need to enable people to act philanthropically?
• Is philanthropy inherently a child of capitalism (and the resultant inequality it creates), or can it be used to create spaces that sit outside the capitalist system?

Related Links

• Amy's book
• Amy's website
• Interview with Amy in Public Seminar
• Review of Amy's book by Hilary Pearson in The Philanthropist Journal
• WPM article "In an ideal world, would there be no philanthropy?"
• WPM article "Why am I not an Effective Altruist?"
• WPM article "MacKenzie Scott & the History of Challenging Philanthropy’s Status Quo"
• Philanthropisms podcast with Patricia Illingworth
• Philanthropisms podcast with Emma Saunders-Hastings
• Philanthropisms podcast with Ben Soskis

In the fifth edition of our partnership with the European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP), we hear from more academics whose work is featured in the latest batch of short, practitioner-focused ERNOP Research Notes.

In this episode we hear from:

• Arthur Gautier from ESSEC Business School, about his work exploring how wealthy people's life experiences shape their views on the relationship between impact investing and philanthropy
• Isabel de Bruin from Erasmus University, about her research on how the "NGO halo effect" (i.e. the inflated sense of moral goodness that nonprofit organisations and their employees might feel) can contribute to unethical behaviour.
• Janis Petzinger from St Andrews University about her work theorizing the role that philanthropic foundations play in the global policy sphere.

Related Links:

• The ERNOP research note based on Arthur's work, and his original paper (co-authored with Anne-Claire Pache and Filipe Santos), "Making Sense of Hybrid Practices: The role of individual adherence to institutional logics in impact investing"
• The ERNOP research note based on Isabel's work, and her original paper (co authored with Allison Russell and Lucas Meijs), "How Moral Goodness Drives Unethical Behavior: Empirical Evidence for the NGO Halo Effect".
• The ERNOP research note based on Janis's work, and her original paper (co-authored with Tobias Jung and Kevin Orr), "Pragmatism, partnerships, and persuasion: theorizing philanthropic foundations in the global policy agora".
• Previous editions of the Philanthropisms podcast partnership with ERNOP: Edition 1, edition 2, edition 3 and edition 4.