S10E9 - Discourse and Domination: Examining Gender and Vulnerability

Episode overview

Episode 9 turns to South and Southeast Asia, bringing together an early-career gender and disaster risk scholar and a senior interdisciplinary disaster governance scientist. Drawing on postcolonial theory, hybridity, and the politics of knowledge production, the episode examines how colonial legacies continue to structure vulnerability, gender exclusion, and state power in the region — and how discourse itself becomes a tool of both domination and resistance.

Hosts

• Jason von Meding
• Ksenia Chmutina

Guests

• Aditya Sharan — Lecturer in Risk Management and Development, Auckland University of Technology; scholar of disaster risk reduction, gender, social exclusion, and participatory governance
• Jonatan Lassa — Senior Disaster Risk Scientist, Earth Sciences New Zealand; Senior Fellow, Charles Darwin University; interdisciplinary scholar of disaster governance, political will, and postcolonial critique

Key themes

• Postcolonial theory and hybridity in disaster studies
• Gender beyond the binary in disaster risk reduction
• Colonial legacies in state and institutional discourse
• Political will, authoritarianism, and the "business" of disaster
• Collaborative governance as a tool of democratic decline
• Resistance, agency, and small acts of negotiation
• Hope amid backlash and institutional inertia

Core discussion highlights

• Aditya Sharan discusses Homi Bhabha's concepts of hybridity and mimicry, applying them to her research with India's Hijra community to show how marginalized groups negotiate power and access resources under conditions shaped by colonial-era criminalization.
• Sharan argues that Bhabha's framework helps move disaster studies beyond binary understandings of gender and vulnerability, situating it alongside contemporaries like Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, and Chandra Mohanty.
• Jonatan Lassa discusses Edward Said, connecting Said's work on discourse and imperialism to his own research on the "path dependency" of disaster policy in Indonesia and Myanmar, and to his activism during the anti-authoritarian movements in West Timor.
• Lassa argues that Western paternalism continues to dominate disaster and humanitarian research, and that framing disaster as "everybody's business" can quietly normalize it as a market opportunity for the resilience and climate finance industries.
• The conversation critiques "collaborative governance" as a hegemonic discourse used by donors and multilateral institutions to sideline critical civil society actors, linking this shift to democratic decline in Indonesia and elsewhere.
• Both guests reflect on resistance as something that can appear as mimicry or small, unnoticed acts rather than only large-scale activism.
• The episode closes with a discussion of hope: both guests point to the persistence of critical dialogue and scholarship — despite repeated setbacks — as itself a source of hope for the field.