PUBlic Professor Series | Dr. Glenda Bonifacio
Communities and disasters: associative acts and total escape?
Dr. Glenda Bonifacio, Department of Women & Gender Studies
Communities respond to disasters, and perhaps disasters build communities. Disasters happen everywhere, and their meanings and perspectives vary. Could we then escape from disasters? What are the associative acts responsible for disasters? And, are these acts fully accounted for in our understanding of disasters? These questions persist to an "accidental' sociologist of disasters, even if I grew up in a country considered third-most vulnerable to natural hazards and coming from the most-at-risk region in the world. Using critical insights from research on migration and post-disaster communities, I open a dialogue of what it means to be a community at this time of possible 'extinction' and amidst a global crisis of humanism.
Glenda Bonifacio is a professor in the Department of Women & Gender Studies at the University of Lethbridge. She teaches varied subjects from the introductory and upper-level courses, in particular the Gender and Globalization series, Sex and Spiritualities series, research methods, activism and advocacy, and seminar on gender and disaster. Glenda is the author of Pinay on the prairies: Filipino Women and Transnational Identities published by UBC Press; editor of 4 internationally-published works on global youth migration (University of Bristol Press 2019), global currents in gender and feminism (Emerald Press 2018), gender and rural migration (Routledge 2014), feminism and migration (Springer 2012); co-editor of 4 books on women and religion (Policy Press 2018), Canadian perspectives on immigration in small cities (Springer 2017), migrant domestic works and family life (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), and gender, religion and migration (Lexington Books 2010). Glenda is the co-founder of ReadWorld Foundation with a major international project to help poor and remote communities affected by disasters rebuild library resources. In 2017, she also co-founded the collective SNAC+ (Support Network for Academics of Colour) in Lethbridge and works to promote racial justice and equity. Glenda was awarded as one of 100 Most Influential Filipino Women in the World in 2015.