Disaster Recovery through Women’s Eyes

This book (re)centres women’s situated knowledges as a powerful starting point for analyzing disaster recovery and rethinking the contested concept of resilience. Through an ethnographic account of reconstruction following Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines, it demonstrates how women’s everyday negotiations with loss and personal aspirations form new imaginaries of recovery grounded in a feminist ethics of care.

The text offers readers a conceptual understanding of resilience as “lived” and entangled in processes of becoming – directly challenging conventional, often neoliberal, frameworks of recovery. It delivers these insights through evocative writing coupled with women’s photo-mediated narratives. By focusing on women’s everyday practices, embodied labours, and emotional relations, the book draws attention to how recovery is a work of creation, self-formation, and hope amidst loss. This approach provides readers with a lens to view resilience as an open project constantly in the making, offering a critical alternative to technocentric models and a grounded basis for more ethical, care-full reconstruction practices.

This book is intended for scholars and students in disaster studies, gender studies, anthropology, development, and environmental studies. Its photo-based methodology will also interest those working with creative social science methods. Crucially, this work provides critical insights for practitioners and policymakers rethinking how communities are governed during and after disasters and how to incorporate perspectives of care in interventions.

Kaira Zoe Alburo-Cañete is a Filipino feminist scholar with training in Anthropology and Critical Development Studies. Her work examines the everyday politics and ethics of living with, responding to, and recovering from disasters and other forms of crisis.