Episode overviewEpisode 2 continues Season 10’s thematic journey with a focused conversation on feminism and disaster studies. The discussion explores how feminist thinking reshapes disaster scholarship and practice, challenges dominant canons, and opens space for listening, care, solidarity, and justice-oriented research.
Hosts
Jason von Meding
Ksenia Chmutina
Guests
Kaira Zoe Alburo-Cañete — Filipino feminist scholar, Senior Researcher at the Humanitarian Studies Centre (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Susamma Seely — crisis and disaster human services specialist; PhD candidate in Disaster Science and Management (University of Delaware)
Key themes
Feminism as a pathway for expanding disaster scholarship
Reading, curiosity, and discovery beyond disciplinary canons
Privilege, access, and barriers to knowledge production
Listening, hearing, and acting on marginalized voices
Feminist methodologies: reflexivity, positionality, care, and solidarity
Decolonial and postcolonial feminist perspectives
The personal, emotional, and everyday dimensions of disasters
Core discussion highlights
Guests reflect on their reading trajectories and how lived experience, storytelling, and curiosity shape feminist scholarship.
Feminism is discussed not as a single framework but as a diverse set of approaches that open space for multiple voices, emotions, and forms of knowledge.
Kaira Alburo-Cañete discusses bell hooks, emphasizing feminist standpoint epistemology, intersectionality, marginality as a site of resistance, and the role of love, care, and solidarity in disaster research.
Susamma Seely discusses Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, focusing on subalternity, listening as a political act, and the challenge of creating spaces where marginalized voices can be heard and acted upon.
The conversation highlights reading as a collective, social practice—through discussion, listening (including audiobooks), and shared curiosity.
Participants reflect on how feminist and decolonial perspectives can inform more equitable research partnerships, especially across Global North–Global South contexts.
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