Episode overview

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.