The Indian Ocean World Podcast
History
In this podcast, Dr Chandni Singh (Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, India) and Prof. Roger Few (University of East Anglia) discuss the different meanings of recovery from disasters and highlight how disasters are caused as much by physical hazards as they are socially generated. Using case studies from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Singh and Few argue that long-term recovery from disasters should focus not only on the measurable, tangible impact (roads, buildings), but also on rebuilding the well-being of communities. Differential access to resources and assets - e.g., loans to rebuild a house, or collateral - meaning rebuilding and recovery have contrasting connotations for affected communities. Media reports too shape the broader understandings of the impact of disasters. While infrastructural recovery is more visible in the recovery policies of Tamil Nadu that has a long history of disasters, psychosocial recovery of people is harder to achieve - as people displaced by a tsunami and rehabilitated to flood-prone areas in Chennai will find it difficult to grow out of stress induced by climatic anomalies. As social scientists and planners, Singh and Few recommend that disaster management, especially for coastal cities like Chennai in India, should be simply not reactive. Instead, a more proactive approach that a) relies upon preserving the wetlands which can absorb a lot of damage caused by floods and cyclones; b) is more attentive towards vulnerability across temporal scales and social differentiation; and, c) is more democratic by including more of people's voices in what recovery means is a better answer to reimagining recovery from disasters. In so doing, Chandni Singh and Roger Few tell us about a relatively lesser-known aspect of human-environment interaction in the Indian Ocean World.
Project website:
Specific outputs:
A British Academy briefing drawing in part on their work:
On earlier work on Disaster Risk in Chennai:
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Tasha Rijke-Epstein - "Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar"
Nienke Boer - "The Briny South"
John Lee - "Sylvan Anxieties and the Making of Landscapes in Early Modern Korea" & "A State of Ranches and Forests"
Krishnendu Ray - "Culinary Cultures on the Move" & "Food in the Indian Ocean World"
Arunima Datta - "Race, Anxiety and Shopping in the Australian Outback: Indian Hawkers and Victoria's 1884 Smallpox Outbreak"
Chris Gratien - ”The Unsettled Plain”
Jeremy Prestholdt - Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim
Julien Greschner - ”Solutions to Poverty According to Those Who Live It: Case Study in Manyatta B Informal Settlement, Kisumu, Kenya”
James Parker - ”Ecologies of Development: Ecophilosophies and Indigenous Action on the Tana River”
James Beattie - ”Migrant Ecologies” & International Review of Environmental History
Sophie Chao - ”The Beetle or the Bug” & ”The Multispecies World of Oil Palm”
Tamara Fernando - ”Mapping Oysters and Making Oceans in the Northern Indian Ocean, 1880–1906”
The IOWC Research Assistants - Summer 2023 Research Roundup
Philip Gooding - “On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890”
Alice Nyawira Karuri - “Adaptation of Small-Scale Tea and Coffee Farmers in Kenya to Climate Change”
Justin Raycraft - “Islamic Discourses of Environmental Change on the Swahili Coast of Southern Tanzania”
Pao K. Wang - The REACHES Database
Kasia Paprocki - “Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh”
Ruth Mostern - “The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History”
Ruth Morgan - “Health, Hearth and Empire: Climate, Race and Reproduction in British India and Western Australia”
Join Podbean Ads Marketplace and connect with engaged listeners.
Advertise Today
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Irish Songs with Ken Murray
History Obscura
Historycal: Words that Shaped the World
The Rest Is History
Lore