Disasters are never experienced or recovered from in the same way by everyone. Understanding recovery therefore requires attention not only to policies and reconstruction programmes, but also to how people’s everyday experiences, relationships, aspirations, and practices of care shape life after disaster.
Dr Kaira Zoe Alburo-Cañete, Disaster Recovery through Women’s Eyes, recentres women’s situated knowledges as a powerful starting point for understanding disaster recovery and rethinking the contested concept of resilience. Drawing on an ethnographic account of reconstruction following Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines, Dr Alburo-Cañete explores how women navigate loss, pursue personal aspirations, and create new possibilities for recovery grounded in a feminist ethics of care.
Rethinking resilience through women’s experiences
Rather than treating resilience as a fixed capacity or an endpoint to be achieved, the book approaches it as something 'lived': an open and evolving process entangled with everyday practices of becoming.
By foregrounding women’s experiences, the book also draws attention to dimensions of recovery that conventional approaches can overlook. Women’s everyday practices, embodied labour, emotional relationships and aspirations provide a different perspective on what it means to rebuild lives following disaster.
In doing so, the book challenges often neoliberal and technocentric approaches to recovery, which can give less attention to the emotional, embodied and relational dimensions of reconstruction. Instead, it shows how a feminist ethics of care can broaden understandings of resilience and recovery.
Recovery as care, creation and hope
Through evocative writing and women’s photo-mediated narratives, Disaster Recovery through Women’s Eyes brings these experiences to the foreground. It presents recovery not simply as a process of rebuilding or returning to what existed before, but also as a process of creation, self-formation and hope amid loss.
This perspective offers a way of understanding resilience as an open project that is constantly in the making. It also provides a grounded basis for considering more ethical and ‘care-full’ approaches to reconstruction that foreground the importance of everyday knowledge, relationships and practices of care.
Implications for research and practice
The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students in disaster studies, gender studies, anthropology, development studies and environmental studies, as well as researchers interested in creative and photo-based social science methods.
It also offers insights for practitioners and policymakers rethinking how communities are governed during and after disasters, including how women’s perspectives and practices of care can be more meaningfully incorporated into recovery programmes.
Add the book to your collection
To purchase the book or access Open Access content of Disaster Recovery through Women’s Eyes, visit the Taylor & Francis website.
- Assistant professor
- Related content
- Related education
