"Understanding the Materiality of Disaster Injustice in Post-Disaster Housing Reconstruction" is our contribution to the special issue on Disaster Justice of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. The piece is a collaboration between anthropologists and architects and is based on our ethnographic field work in an estuarine island in Manila Bay from 2020-2022 that was made possible by a research grant from the Brown University Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. It's been a great experience working with anthropologist Monica Santos and architects Simon Cervantes and Olivia Sicam for this project and enriching each other's respective disciplines.
Below is the abstract:
This article contributes to disaster justice literature by analyzing the materialities of disaster injustice in an island community exposed to multiple hazards. Harnessing methods at the junctures of anthropology and architecture, this article uses the concept of “material register” to examine how injustice is articulated in housing reconstruction. The study identifies three material registers that operate within this particular disaster context: housing as a roof overhead, housing as lifeworld, and housing as private responsibility. These material registers highlight how post-disaster housing reconstruction is embedded in particular social, economic, and political realities.
You can download the accepted manuscript here: