Talking Humanitarianism

Should existing models of community resilience be challenged? Roberto Barrios, Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans shares his experiences conducting research in hurricane affected areas of Honduras with Ekatherina Zhukova, Researcher at Lund University, and explains how his findings question existing models of community resilience. In this extended episode, Zhukova and Barrios also discuss disasters as moments of community emergence, how communities change over the course of a disaster and the internal and external factors that influence why one community may recover after a disaster and another does not.

How do we conceptualise vulnerability in the context of humanitarian disasters? Ekatherina Zhukova, Researcher at Lund University in Sweden, and Andrew Littlejohn, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University in the Netherlands discuss shifting our understanding of vulnerability to locate responsibility not in people, but with societal institutions and systems that produce vulnerability of particular places or people. Zhukova and Littlejohn also discuss shifting our thinking about humanitarian disaster responses from a one size fits all approach to emphasise bottom-up processes, where we begin with urgent ethnography and investigation to understand the worlds of the people we are trying to help before dictating how their world is to be reconstructed.

What are the different roles and perspectives of humanitarian researchers and practitioners when it comes to disasters and how are these converging? Ekatherina Zhukova, Researcher at Lund University in Sweden, and Zuzana Hrdlickova, Senior Researcher at Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre and humanitarian practitioner, explore humanitarian disasters through the lens of both humanitarian researchers and practitioners. Zhukova and Hrdlickova also discuss the similarities and differences between disasters and conflicts, as well as the concept of disaster vulnerability and how this relates to both precarity and informality.

What role does anthropology play in our understanding of humanitarian disasters? Ekatherina Zhukova, Researcher at Lund University in Sweden, and Alicia Sliwinski, Associate Professor of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, discuss the tools anthropology offers in addressing issues around development, humanitarianism, and disasters. Zhukova and Sliwinski explore concepts such as moral economy, disaster vulnerability and the notion of the ‘gift'.