Dr Hanna Ruszczyk: Gender and Resilience in the City: Infrastructures, aspirations and slow violence

Please register for the online zoom event here.

The importance of attending to gender (not only women) in academically overlooked, small urbanising cities is critical to our understanding of global urbanisms, social justice and development. Gender, caste, class struggles matter in Bharatpur, Nepal. The local authorities and residents are learning how to govern and live in a space where relationships are changing. There are two particular gendered groups that function on a neighbourhood level. Mothers’ groups provide invisible, community resilience in the form of social infrastructures. They experience slow violence by patriarchal power structures who will not allow them to be more than resilient. Meanwhile, by participating in neighbourhood groups, certain men (particularly high caste and affluent) are allowed to rework the urban and fulfil their aspirations for physical infrastructure in the form of paved roads in a new state grey space controlled by the local authority. The experiences of mothers’ groups, neighbourhood groups, governmental officials and international development projects show who has power, who is kept invisible to whom and who can create the city in their imaginary.

Bio for Dr Hanna Ruszczyk

My research is concerned with urban risk and resilience governance strategies and frameworks in cities of the global South. I investigate which portfolio of risks different scales of government are concerned with and which they govern for. Exploring how residents manage their interpretation of risk and how residents interact with local authorities is also a key area of my research. Understanding how the international aid community, different scales of government, and urban residents interact to make regional cities resilient and liveable is an additional element of my research. 

I have spent most of my career living and working in countries that are rapidly changing and urbanising. My international development work, primarily with United Nations agencies (International Labour Organisation and United Nations Development Programme), has focused on livelihoods and local economic development in several countries. One of my professional strengths is my ability to build relationships with a wide range of stakeholders in different fields and to collaborate for a common purpose. I am particularly keen to ensure my research is of relevance to practitioners, policy makers and governments.