Dr Maria Carinnes Alejandria - Localizing Resilience in Urban Communities in Southeast Asia: Community-based Knowledge and Responses to Flooding during the COVID-19 Pandemic

IAS Residential Fellow Dr Maria Carinnes Alejandria delivers a seminar on their research -

Between 2020-2022 the Southeast Asian subregion of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines experienced unprecedented flooding in urban areas which impacted thousands of residents while stringent lockdowns due to securitized management of the COVID-19 pandemic were in place. For most affected communities, managing the impacts of compounded disasters entailed engaging new modalities of resilience as conventional processes and sources of aid became inaccessible. In this seminar, I am to nuance the concept of resilience by situating flooding narratives during the pandemic from four cities in the subregion. Specifically, I will discuss the contexts that exacerbated their risks to overlapping hazards. I will also present the knowledge systems and actions they engaged in to reduce their risks and recover after disaster events. Drawing from qualitative data, I aim to discuss inductively generated themes which include, 1) role of informal networks, 2) gendered disaster response and preparation, and 3) forms of community-based humanitarian action.

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