Disaster and Resilience: Intersectional Approaches Towards Establishing Resilient Communities During Crises

Volume 32, Issue 3 | November 2024

 
Read the issue blog
Extreme weather events, wars, and industrial accidents have had devastating impacts on communities as well as the natural and built environment. Disasters, even when triggered by natural processes, are often the results of poor policy decisions and compound already existing social faultlines both in the global North and South. They are also more than temporally demarcated ‘events’ and shape the collective lives and memories of those affected far beyond the moment of occurrence of the specific disaster.
Contributions to this special issue examine the structural factors that shape disaster, recovery, and resilience, paying particular attention to the sheer force of community organising in building resilience in contexts marked by massive state and institutional failures. They offer a way of reading these community-based interventions as an unsettling of the ontology and epistemology of disaster and resilience by: (1) locating resilience within the context of the neoliberal development project; (2) situating disasters within histories of continuous dispossession; (3) acknowledging care work as political work that builds resilience; (4) recognising the need for a gender-just disaster management, relief, and recovery landscape; and (5) foregrounding community-based and community-driven praxis.

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Below, you can find free access to the Introduction, four articles, and the Resources and Book Reviews sections of the issue.

For free access to all of the articles, visit the Oxfam Policy & Practice website and search using the article title.

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Articles

Disaster and resilience: intersectional approaches towards establishing resilient communities during crises
Suranjana Gupta, Gayatri Menon, Ayse Yonder, Shivani Satija & Anandita Ghosh

Resilience aspirations, precarious futures: gender invisibility, racialised risk, and forced displacements in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Luciana Mendes Barbosa

Organised dispossession and development as disaster: analysing caste and gender in disaster policymaking
Muneeb Ul Lateef Banday & Anukriti Dixit

Tiding over socio-ecological vulnerabilities: experiences of two groups of cleaning/domestic women workers from Kerala, India
Anamika Ajay & J. Devika

Beyond drinking water supply infrastructure: gendered lived experiences in coastal Bangladesh
Afsana Afrin Esha

Neend Udaao Andolan: Bhopali women’s responses to the ongoing environmental and health disaster surrounding the abandoned Union Carbide factory, Bhopal, India
Rachna Dhingra & Madhumita Dutta

Promoting youth advocacy for resilience to disasters: a pilot study
Allen Hyde, Meltem Alemdar, Katie OConnell, Philip Omunga, Michelle Reckner, Yanni Loukissas, Iris Tien, Mohsin Yousufi, Nisha Botchwey, Olivia Chatman, Kamiya Clayton, Mildred McClain, Mustafa Shabazz & Blaine Branch

Building Community Resilience: Strategies of Women and Nonbinary-led Grassroots Organisations in New York City
Ayse Yonder

A Beirut blast: how inclusive disaster management for refugees and hosts reassembled a community in a disintegrated city
Jasmin Lilian Diab

The role of rituals and cultural heritage in post-disaster social resilience: the case of Antakya
Sonyel Oflazoğlu & Metin Dora

Establishing resilient communities through women’s leadership and organising: a case study in Gaziantep, Türkiye
Mia Tong & Ceren Topgül

Taking others in: conceptualising hosting with feminist ethics of care and mutual aid
Cynthia Caron

The Community Resilience Fund: a transformative tool for grassroots women-led community resilience
Suranjana Gupta, Anwesha Tewary, Violet Shivutse, Elisabeth Markham, Doreen Magotsi, Brigita Ra Sekar Laras, Syarifah Anggrenni & Shraddha Pandya

Resources

Here you can find additional materials related to the issue. These are compiled by Anandita Ghosh and Shivani Satija.

View Resources Section

Book Reviews

Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx edited by Shilpa Phadke and Nithila Kanagasabai. Reviewed by Sadaf Nausheen

Contemporary Gender Formations in India: In-between Conformity, Dissent and Affect edited by Nandini Dhar. Reviewed by Deepti Komalam

Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India by Chetan Choithani. Reviewed by Kunal Munjal and Amrita Datta