A Decade of Disaster Experiences in Otautahi Christchurch

Shinya Uekusa is a disaster sociologist and most recently works as an Assistant Professor in the School of Culture and Society at Aarhus University in Denmark. He has returned to Aotearoa and joined Massey University’s Health and Ageing Research Team (HART) to work on the Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC) funded research project on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on older people in Aotearoa. His main research interests are in (im)migration, the sociology of language, and disaster sociology, particularly focusing on how the socially disadvantaged groups such as (im)migrants, refugees and linguistic minorities experience and cope with cultural, economic, environmental, political and social challenges.

Steve Matthewman is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Auckland. His last book on disasters was Disasters, Risks and Revelation: Making Sense of Our Times (2015). He also co-edited Exploring Society: Sociology forNew Zealand Students (Auckland University Press, 2019) with Ruth McManus, and the third edition of Being Sociological (Red Globe Press) with Bruce Curtis and David Mayeda. His current research project is a three-year Royal Society of New Zealand-funded work “Power Politics: Electricity and Sustainability in Post-Disaster Otautahi (Christchurch)”. The broad focus of this research is on how we build sustainability into the city. The narrow focus is on the place of renewable energy in this process. 

Bruce C. Glavovic is a Professor at Massey University. For much of the last decade his research has focused on the role of governance and natural hazards planning in addressing vulnerability and risk in a changing climate. He is Senior Editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science and co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Ocean & Coastal Management. He was a Coordinating Lead Author for the chapter on sea level rise ina 2019 IPCC Special Report and is a Lead Author and Cross Chapter Paper co-lead in the IPCC’s forthcoming Working Group II Sixth Assessment Report.