S10E2 - Feminism, Listening, and Disaster Justice

Episode overview
Episode 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 Seeley — 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 Seeley 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.