ACU Summer School 2021 | Urban disasters: Vulnerability and resilience in a pandemic

Professor Janki Andharia
Dean, School of Disaster Studies     
Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), India

Professor Andharia's areas of work focus on gender, environmental concerns, social planning, participatory development, and addressing diverse forms of marginalisation and vulnerability. She has participated in over 20 national disaster response activities and has worked closely in post-disaster relief and rehabilitation. Her current research work focuses on policy accountability to 'at-risk' populations. She has also successfully led several international missions to forge collaborations between TISS and other universities, and offered special lectures. Prominent among these is a partnership with the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Geneva which now offers an on-line certificate course in disaster management with participants from over 90 countries enrolling.

Professor Amita Baviskar
Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology and Anthropology
Head of the Department of Environmental Studies
Ashoka University, India

Professor Baviskar's research and teaching address the cultural politics of environment and development in rural and urban India. She is currently looking at the social experience of air pollution in Delhi. In January 2020, she published Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi. Professor Baviskar has been awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research, and the 2010 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences.

Dr Amita Bhide
Dean and Professor, School of Habitat Studies
Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), India

Dr Amita Bhide is the Dean of the School of Habitat Studies at TISS. Her recent work explores issues of urban development, specifically those concerning urban transformations and their link to inclusive and sustainable development. Dr Bhide has extensively researched urban local governance and planning, water and sanitation, housing, and land issues. She is working to develop a theoretical and action model of urbanisation that is relevant for the global south through an engagement with several transformative groups at the city, provincial and national scales. The geographic focus of her work is Mumbai and most recently, small and medium towns.

Dr Basirat Oyalowo
Manager, Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development
University of Lagos, Nigeria

Dr Basirat Oyalowo specialises in housing studies, informality, urban sustainability and comparative African studies. Her recent research on Lagos includes housing supply and co-operatives societies (PhD), housing informality and inequality and COVID-19 adaptation strategies of residents of multi-tenanted housing. She consulted for the Lagos Resilience Strategy (2019) and later adopted a citizen-science approach to co-produce a Community Resilience Plan for an informal community (2020).

Professor Mark Pelling
Professor of Geography, King's Centre for Integrated Research on Risk and Resilience
King's College London, UK

Professor Mark Pelling has served as a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report and the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX), and as lead author on its Fifth Assessment Report. He chairs the Centre for Integrated Research on Risk and Resilience, and is currently seconded for half his time to the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund as a Resilience Challenge Lead.

Dr Caroline Skinner
Senior Researcher, African Centre for Cities   
University of Cape Town, South Africa

Dr Caroline Skinner is a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, and Urban Research Director for the global policy research network Women in Informal Employment:  Globalizing and Organizing. For over two decades, Caroline’s work has interrogated the informal economy and processes of informality. This is with a view to generate new knowledge and inform livelihood-centred policy and planning responses. She has a long track record of policy and advocacy work at a local, provincial, national and international level, and provides technical support for worker-based movements.