id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
ca-4922	Firoz, Malay	Quantifying Vulnerability: Humanitarian Datafication and the Neophilia of Integrated Power	2024		.htm	text/html	10621	508	44	VASyR provided policymakers with a quantitative formula to rank refugee households in terms of vulnerability scores—from “low” to “severe”—which could then be used to project a comprehensive national overview of refugee vulnerability and prioritize the neediest families for targeted assistance, such as cash vouchers and shelter rehabilitation. By telescoping outward from the ethnographic moment of refugee assessment, to the datasets that determine which refugees are assessed, the transfiguration of vulnerability into algorithmic values, the retrenchment of targeted aid on the basis of those values, and the broader ecosystem of interlinked data systems into which vulnerability indexing feeds, this article shows how the datafication of humanitarianism adds successive layers of abstraction that precipitate a growing integration and centralization of humanitarian power. ENCOUNTERS WITH A DATA BUREAUCRAT On a sunny July morning, I met with Mahmoud, a young Syrian aid worker, at his INGO’s field office in Kouaikhat, a small town in Lebanon’s northern governorate of Akkar.1 Mahmoud was tasked with conducting household vulnerability assessments among Syrian refugees and had agreed to take me along.	cache/ca-4922.htm	txt/ca-4922.txt