Why Vulnerability Still Matters

Greg Bankoff works on community resilience and the way societies adapt to hazard as a frequent life experience. For the last 30 years, he has focused his research on understanding how societies, both past and present, have learnt to normalise risk and the way communities deal with crisis through a historical sociological approach. His publications include co-authoring The Red Cross's World Disaster Report 2014: Focusing on Culture and Risk and a companion, coedited volume entitled Cultures and Disasters: Understanding Cultural Framings in Disaster Risk Reduction (2015).Dorothea Hilhorst focuses on aid-society relations: studying how aid is shaped by the manifold actions of actors in and around programmes for protection, service delivery and capacity development. She has a special interest in the intersections of humanitarianism with development, peacebuilding, and gender-relations. She has done extensive work on humanitarian accountability and situations where disasters meet conflict. Her research programmes have taken place in many settings affected by disaster, conflict, and fragility. Currently, her main research programme concerns changes in humanitarian governance and opportunities for accountability and advocacy, and practices of transactional sex in humanitarian crisis situations.