Autoethnographic Reflections on Humanitarianism and Resilience

This book explores the politics of knowledge in humanitarianism, disaster resilience, and development practice through a collection of autoethnographic and reflective accounts by researchers, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners. Drawing on experiences across diverse institutional, cultural, and political contexts, the contributors examine how humanitarian, resilience, and development interventions are shaped not only by technical frameworks and evidence-based systems, but also by positionality, ethical judgment, emotional labor, professional identities, and everyday negotiations of power.

Positioning autoethnography as both a qualitative research methodology and a critical epistemological intervention, the book interrogates how dominant forms of knowledge are produced, legitimized, and operationalized within aid, disaster risk reduction, resilience-building, and development systems. It discusses the limits of standardized evaluation, accountability mechanisms, and technical expertise, while highlighting the significance of embodied, relational, and contextually situated knowledge.

Organized around three interconnected themes - contexts and power, identities and roles, and critical and transformative perspectives - the chapters address issues including researcher positionality, humanitarian advocacy, decolonial practice, gender norms, trauma, care, professional ethics, remote research, and institutional constraints.

By bringing personal experience into dialogue with broader structures of authority, inequality, and knowledge production, Autoethnographic Reflections on Humanitarianism and Resilience offers a nuanced contribution to scholars and advanced students in humanitarian and development studies interested in critical and decolonial perspectives on contemporary humanitarian and development practice and disaster resilience.