Dr Ruszczyk was an invited speaker at the Resilience Development Initiative Indonesia

Dr Hanna Ruszczyk, Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience (IHRR) at Durham University, was invited to reflect on Gender and Resilience in the City book with colleagues at Resilience Development Initiative, a large think tank in Southeast Asia.

The book highlights the importance of attending to gender (not only women) in policy efforts. It explores two gendered groups that function on a neighbourhood level: mothers' groups and neighbourhood groups. Mothers’ groups provide invisible community resilience in the form of social infrastructures. They experience slow violence by patriarchal power structures that will not allow them to be more than resilient. Meanwhile, by participating in neighbourhood groups, certain men (particularly high caste and affluent ones) are allowed to rework the urban and fulfil their aspirations for physical infrastructure in the form of paved roads in a new state-grey space controlled by the local authority.

You can buy the book Gender and Resilience in the City at Practical Action Publishing.

You can see more of Dr Ruszczyk's work on her personal website. 

Photo credit: Ruszczyk, H 2023