Your search within this document for 'Social' resulted in eleven matching pages.
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“...our reflections and contributed to a better understanding of our own multiple engagements. Financial support for our research in the months prior to the earthquakes was provided by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and the U.S. Department of Education Fulbright Hays Program, respectively. Austin Lord s post-earthquake research in Nepal has also been supported by a U.S. Department of State Area Studies Foreign Language & Area Studies Fellowship. Galen Murtons research in Nepal was funded by the Social Science Research Council as well as the Department of Geography and the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. Austin would like to express heartfelt appreciation to his family members in Nepal, who supported us in innumerable ways throughout this entire process, particularly Roop Sagar Moktan and Deepanjali Moktan. He especially thanks his wife, fellow Rasuwa Relief co-founder and permanent counsel, Sneha Moktan, for her love, patience, and support, without which none...”
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“...experiences with disaster (Hidalgo & Barber 2009) or their direct engagements and interventions within post-disaster relief and recovery efforts (Farmer 2011; Schuller 2014; Liboiron 2015). In the wake of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal, many academics considered their own complex relations with people and place in post-earthquake Nepal—similarly reflecting on the unstable boundaries between scholarly, humanitar- ian, and personal engagement—while others articulated productive critiques of the role of social scientists in the time of disaster (K.C. & Shakya 2015; Hindman 2015). These conversations continue, particularly in light of the difficult and slow process of post-earthquake recovery and the like- lihood of future seismic activity in the Himalaya region. 88 HIMALAYA Fall2017...”
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“...survivors from the Langtang community shifted to a camp for Internally Displaced Persons (iDPs) that had been established at the Phuntsok Choeling Monastery near Swayambhunath in Kathmandu. Austin and others made several visits to the camp to provide relief materials and to talk with community members. After less than 48 hours in Kathmandu, Austin, grew frustrated with the uneven impacts and optics of the disaster (cf. Shneiderman & Turin 2015; Nelson 2015) and wrote the following statement on social media: To be clear: Kathmandu is not just a pile of rubble. Don’t believe the hype. Without dismissing the very real needs of some people, the damage is remark- ably, fortunately, and unexpectedly limited com- pared with the possibilities and most importantly with other parts of Nepal. I say this because most current international media continues to reinforce longstanding spatial biases: that there is Kathman- du, Everest, and the rest of Nepal, only vaguely referenced or understood... [yet]...”
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“...uncertainties faced by dis- placed survivors. Our colleague Bob Beazley provided a detailed report on damage in Lower Rasuwa based on his reconnaissance trip in the days immediately following the earthquake. Our conversations with friends and research contacts in Rasuwa also indicated that relief efforts had not yet reached communities in the northern reaches of the district. Importantly, our response was also shaped by prior knowl- edge of the region and its people. We were well aware of legacies of social and spatial exclusion experienced by Tamang populations in Rasuwa who had been subject to centuries of marginalization, corvee labor, and the codified caste-based discrimination of the muluki ain (Holmberg 1977; Campbell 2013). The earthquake hit Tamang com- munities across northern-Nepal particularly hard (Magar 2015),6 compounding everyday vulnerabilities, especially in Rasuwa, where 82% of the district population identi- fies as Tamang (Ghale 2015). The uneven impacts of the earthquakes on...”
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“...collectives with direct connections to specific areas of Nepal comprised a significant share of relief distribution (Tamang 2015).7 And so, in the first days of May 2015, we also gathered with a small group of volunteers to discern the shape of current needs, gather resources, and form a plan of action. Describing ourselves as a ‘humanitarian volun- teer initiative’—a framing carefully worded to signal our non-professional orientation to the disaster—we released our first public statement via social media. Like many others who have found themselves at the frontiers of disaster response in the 21st century, we launched a crowd-funding campaign to support our initial efforts. We had become a diverse collective of nine people [see Acknowledgments], and we called ourselves Rasuwa Relief. Disaster & Unevenness in Rasuwa Heading upstream along the Trishuli River with our fellow volunteers during our first major relief mission on May 10th, we could see that the impacts of the earthquake and the...”
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“...and despite the confusion. Engagement and Praxis in the Post-Earthquake Landscape For two years after the earthquake, we worked as Rasuwa Relief on a variety of different projects—ranging from interventions focused on immediate humanitarian relief to collaborative community-based projects committed to long-term recovery. This kind of sustained engagement, always challenging and often frustrating, was informed by a lived praxis that complemented and enriched our academic understandings of risk, social inequality, and uneven vulnerabilities. Put differently, as our work progressed, we learned how to refine and improve our engagements through everyday practice—which included recognizing our own limits. As the pattern of our engage- ment became more elaborate, it also became increasingly multiple, which allowed us to consider both the post-earthquake landscape of Rasuwa and our positions within it from a variety of perspectives. In May and June of 2015, Rasuwa Relief’s work targeted gaps exposed...”
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“...tell their own stories of life in Langtang before and after the avalanche (Langtang Memory Project 2016). We understand these projects as part of a larger commitment to polyvocality in the wake of disaster—providing space for at-risk commu- nities to describe their own conditions of vulnerability and narrate their own process of recovery (Schuller 2014; Liboiron 2015; Gergan 2016). Through Rasuwa Relief, we also undertook a social media campaign that we hoped would provide insight into the situation ‘on the ground’ in Rasuwa and promote greater understanding of the social and political complexities of the earthquake aftermath. With these efforts, we tried to focus attention on the socially constructed dimensions of Figure 8. In March 2016, Amchi Tenjing Bista administers care to an elderly woman with chronic health problems in the village of Gatlang. These mobile health camps allowed a team of amchi (practitioners of Tibetan medicine/Sowa Rigpa) to treat over 1,000 patients in Upper Rasuwa...”
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“...this work, we sought to critique and counter the kind of official representations of disaster that “are dominant to the point of ubiquity” (Liboiron 2015:147) and that reproduce the uneven delineation of certain ‘acceptable’ risks in Nepal. While constructing these critical narratives, we tried to limit the effect and affect of our own mediations and focused on promoting the voice and agency of earthquake-affected Nepalis over our own. However, while this approach was inflected by the ethics of social science, it was neither completely objective nor apolitical. In fact, and especially with respect to Rasuwa, we acted specifically and intentionally to make certain people, places, practices, processes, and pasts more visible than others—to draw attention to certain needs still unmet, like pervasive struggles with mental health, and to explicate the complex process of reconstruction (and its politics) to a broader international audience. These attempts to promote informed and critical awareness...”
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“...to be co-present at a difficult moment; to act in terms of an ethic of care. Importantly, we are not alone in seeking to understand the possibilities of multiple engagement in the wake of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal (cf. March 2015; Craig 2015; Shakya 2015; Shneiderman 2015). An increasing number of scholars have contributed to this effort in the context of other disasters (Oliver-Smith 1986; Farmer 2011; Schuller 2014; Liboiron 2015) and critical dialogue about the posi- tions and values of social scientists in the wake of disaster continues in Nepal (i.e. K.C. & Shakya 2015; Hindman 2015; McGranahan 2015). In recent years, several workshops and events focused on patterns of engagement in post-earth- quake Nepal have been held at academic conferences (for example, the ‘Nepal Earthquake Summit’ at Dartmouth College, February 2016) and new solidarities focused on knowledge-sharing and collaboration are emerging (such as the recently established ‘Nepal Geographers Association,’ April 2017)...”
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“...Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. His research in Nepal focuses on the social, economic, and environmental effects of infrastructure development, the formation of infrastructural publics and imaginaries, and perceptions of risk and uncertainty. His current project analyzes the reconfiguration of imagined futures and economies of anticipation in the wake of the 2015 earthquakes. Austin holds a Master of Environmental Science from Yale University and a B.A. in Economics from Dartmouth College. A portfolio of his visual work focused on Nepal can be found at . Galen Murton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison University with teaching responsibilities in the Geographic Sciences Program. He completed his PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder (2017). His dissertation examined the social and geopolitical impacts of infrastructure projects in High Asia with a focus on road...”
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“...4. At the time of the earthquake, both authors were U.S. Fulbright Scholars in Nepal, conducting research on infrastructure development, mobility and social change. For more information on our scholarly contributions see Lord (2014; 2016), Murton (2015; 2017), or Murton, Lord & Beazley (2016). 5. More than 300 people lost their lives in the Langtang Valley on April 25th, including 175 Langtangpa. Unfortunately, more than two years after the earthquake, some of the bodies have not yet been recovered from the Langtang avalanche zone. 6. For example, Tamang communities make up only 5.8% of Nepal’s population yet an estimated 34% of total earthquake casualties were Tamang (Magar 2015). See also Thapa (2015). 7. At this point in the ‘Emergency Phase,’ most large NGOs were still establishing logistical supply chains (with the exception of a few with air assets) and mobilizations by the Nepalese state (with the exception of the Nepal Army, which focused on search and rescue and evacuation operations)...”