The Kathmandu Branch Office of Heidelberg University’s South Asia Institute
invites you to its Lecture Series
Jeremy Spoon
Disaster Transformations:
Socio-Ecological Transitions Following the 2015 Nepal Earthquakes
Friday, 11 November 2016
4 pm
Yalamaya Kendra, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
This presentation shares on-going research that seeks to determine whether varied social and cultural structures, such as institutional context, connectivity, livelihood diversity and social memory are useful indicators of adaptive capacity and critical transitions following a natural disaster. It takes a coupled social-ecological systems approach and utilizes mixed quantitative and qualitative methods. The project focuses on the catastrophic 2015 Nepal earthquakes as a case study, which had approximately 9,075 deaths, more than 22,300 injuries and damaged or destroyed 755,500 homes. It engages both the anthropology of disaster and resilience literatures by combining the broader theorization of interdisciplinary, quantitative modeling in the critical transitions research with the more textured qualitative approaches of the social science of disaster.
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Jeremy Spoon currently is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Portland State University and a Research Affiliate at the Central Department of Anthropology at Tribhuvan University. He received an MA and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. His research focuses on local ecological knowledge, mountainous protected areas, disaster management, and applied anthropology in the USA and the Nepalese Himalaya.
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This event is open to all.