Becoming resilient: disaster recovery in post-Yolanda Philippines through women's eyes

Abstract

The thesis contributes to the scholarship on disaster recovery by centring the experiences of women as a category of analysis and a methodological approach. I argue that women s everyday realities are a site for disrupting the powerful circuits of knowledge and practice that articulate pathways of recovery through the notion of resilience. As a feminist research, analysing disaster recovery involves exploring possibilities for reclaiming alternative futures. Thus, my research asks: what possibilities for reimagining resilience might women s experiences of recovery reveal?

I focus on the reconstruction of Tacloban City, Philippines, after its destruction by typhoon Yolanda in November 2013. To answer my question, I investigated: 1) how resilience has been inscribed in the institutional and social landscape of Tacloban, and 2) how women qualified, re-appropriated, or contested attempts to build their resilience as a way to map out possibilities for alternative pathways of recovery. Using PhotoKwento, a photo-based feminist method which I designed, the study focuses on urban poor women s experiences of disaster resettlement.

My findings show that building back better has been enmeshed in a citizenship project aiming to produce responsible and resilient communities. I identify new modes of governing that employ state performances of care on one hand, and the instrumentalisation of women s participation and care-based practices in service of the state s visions for recovery, on the other. Foregrounded are women s navigations of precarity, insecurity, and the unknown amidst attempts to make them better . The thesis shows how the processes of self-formation; the workings of emotions and aspirations; and care relations with others and the environment counterbalance hegemonic views about resilient recovery. I underscore productive tensions as governmental practices, discourses, and prevailing ideologies are incorporated, negotiated, and contested in and through women s care-based practices, affective labours, and hopes for a better future after and beyond Yolanda.

Lastly, I reconceptualise resilience as lived , grounded in feminist ethics of care. A lived resilience perspective requires broadening ethico-ontological horizons in order to view resilient recovery as a process of becoming not simply driven by the goal to rebuild what has been damaged, but as a regenerative practice that centers care as a normative basis for exploring post-disaster futures.