It is no secret that the state of global humanitarian aid is experiencing a crisis of its own. In 2025 alone, major global donors that covered nearly half of the global humanitarian appeal and even more acutely, 70% in regions such as Latin America and the Caribbean (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2025) significantly slashed funding. These cuts marked a shift from partnership-focused development aid to conditional funding often hinged to securitization and hyper-politicized objectives. Yet there is still hope within crises, one where academia within the field of humanitarian action is being prioritized. One point of light is the grants being provided by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung which sees one million Euros being granted to expand Humanitarian Studies in Germany led by senior academics from Bochum, Bayreuth, and Magdeburg.

I spoke with PACS lecturer, PD Dr. Kristina Roepstorff – senior lecturer at the Otto Von Guericke University Magdeburg, whose two-decade career as both a researcher and lecturer has been focused on Humanitarian Action, Forced Migration and Peacebuilding. 

The initial step of the 3-year funding period will be the community: bringing researchers and professionals together to develop a collective understanding of what is needed to create a stronger, more coordinated direction and space for this work and generate more knowledge. 

“The idea is to generate more funding to make it bigger, to get students involved in the conferences and support [students] so that they don’t feel isolated and have to fight to justify that this is a relevant field of inquiry.”

As we closed our conversation, we spoke about this very relevance which spans across continents, is interdisciplinary and delves into areas of resilience, best practices and policy within crisis response and research about crises. All this, she says, is based on the values of solidarity and humanity, which the project hopes to embody with exchanges across the Global North and Global South spaces. Dr. Roepstorff shared that at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, the research project will be rooted in visuality and narratives of crisis in the Global South and best practices within that space. It is aptly named “Humanitarian Imaginaries: Discourses, Visuality and Practices in the Global South.” For more information, visit the funder website at https://www.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/