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This paper aims to examine and compare extant literature on the application of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques in humanitarian operations (HOs) and humanitarian supply chains (HSCs). It identifies the status of existing research in the field and suggests a roadmap for academicians to undertake further research in HOs and HSCs using MCDM techniques.

The paper systematically reviews the research on MCDM applications in HO and HSC domains from 2011 to 2022, as the field gained traction post-2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami phenomena. In the first step, an exhaustive search for journal articles is conducted using 48 keyword searches. To ensure quality, only those articles published in journals featuring in the first quartile of the Scimago Journal Ranking were selected. A total of 103 peer-reviewed articles were selected for the review and then segregated into different categories for analysis.

The paper highlights insufficient high-quality research in HOs that utilizes MCDM methods. It proposes a roadmap for scholars to enhance the research outcomes by advocating adopting mixed methods. The analysis of various studies revealed a notable absence of contextual reference. A contextual mind map specific to HOs has been developed to assist future research endeavors. This resource can guide researchers in determining the appropriate contextual framework for their studies.

This paper will help practitioners understand the research carried out in the field. The aspiring researchers will identify the gap in the extant research and work on future research directions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first literature review on applying MCDM in HOs and HSCs. It summarises the current status and proposes future research directions.

The transcript provides an overview of the development of the field and changing paradigms in this regard.

The transcript was developed in the context of a United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) project on the history of disaster risk reduction (DRR).

The transcript traces the initial discussions of how the At Risk book was conceived and presents new dimensions and challenges within the field.

The interview highlights the importance of the need to document the transitions, developments and paradigm changes in the field over time.

Urban communities can be faced with many destructive events that can disrupt the daily functioning of activities and livelihood of people living in the communities. In this regard, during the last couple of years, many governments have put a lot of efforts into building resilient urban communities. Essentially, a resilient urban community has the capacity to anticipate future disasters, prepare for and recover timely from adverse effects of disasters and unexpected circumstances. Considering this, it is therefore important for the need to continuously review the existing urban community resilience indicators, in order to identify emerging ones to enable comprehensive evaluation of urban communities in the future against unexpected events. This study therefore aims to conduct a systematic review to develop and critically analyse the emerging and leading urban community resilience indicators.

Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRSIMA) protocol, 53 journal articles were selected using Scopus. The selected papers were subjected to thorough content analysis.

From the review, 45 urban community resilience indicators were identified. These indicators were grouped into eight broad categories namely, Socio-demographic, Economic, Institutional Resilience, Infrastructure and Housing Resilience, Collaboration, Community Capital, Risk Data Accumulation and Geographical and Spatial characteristics of community. Further, the results indicated that the U.S had the highest number of publications, followed by Australia, China, New Zealand and Taiwan. In fact, very few studies emanated from developing economies.

The outputs of this study will inform policymakers, practitioners and researchers on the new and emerging indicators that should be considered when evaluating the resilience level of urban communities. The findings will also serve as a theoretical foundation for further detailed empirical investigation.

The authors revisit the notion of co-production, highlight more critical and re-politicized forms of co-production and introduce three principles for its operationalization. The paper’s viewpoint aims to find entry points for enabling more equitable disaster research and actions via co-production.

The authors draw insights from the authors’ reflections as climate and disaster researchers and literature on knowledge politics in the context of disaster and climate change, especially within critical disaster studies and feminist political ecology.

Disaster studies can better contribute to disaster risk reduction via political co-production and situating local and Indigenous knowledge at the center through three principles, i.e. ensuring knowledge plurality, surfacing norms and assumptions in knowledge production and driving actions that tackle existing knowledge (and broader sociopolitical) structures.

The authors draw out three principles to enable the political function of co-production based on firsthand experiences of working with local and Indigenous peoples and insights from a diverse set of co-production, feminist political ecology and critical disaster studies literature. Future research can observe how it can utilize these principles in its respective contexts.

The question of “why we are in disaster studies” can be essential to reflect on discourses and practices – as students, researchers and professors – in constituting an oppressive disaster science and finding ways to liberate from it.

This paper is based on autobiographical research and institutional ethnography to observe and analyze the discourses and practices about career trajectories as students, researchers and professors in disaster studies.

The paper provides some categories, concepts, theoretical approaches and lived experiences helpful for discussing ways of liberating disaster studies, such as public sociology of disaster.

Few papers have focused on professional trajectories in disaster studies, bringing insights from public sociology and questioning oppressive disaster science.

Research in critical disaster studies stresses the urgency to explore alternative ontological framings (Gaillard and Raju, 2022) that encourages researchers and practitioners, especially Indigenous communities, to nurture spaces where Indigenous voices are well represented. It is imperative that research in the Pacific should be guided by Pacific research methodologies to maximize positive outcomes (Ponton, 2018) and break free from limited Eurocentric ideologies that are often ill-suited in Pacific contexts. Hazards in the South Pacific region have become more frequent and volatile. This has created a growing interest in the study of disasters in the region. However, current disaster studies in the Pacific are often problematic as they often fail to challenge the implicit coloniality of the discipline.

This paper will expand on these arguments, suggesting ways to overcome the limits of common Eurocentric research frameworks in disaster studies and to illustrate the significance and relevance of Pacific methodologies.

It is pertinent that critical disaster studies encapsulate Pacific worldviews and knowledge as valued and valid to reconstruct Pacific research. Decolonizing disaster research will ultimately liberate the discipline from limitations of its colonial past and allow for truly engaging and critical research practices.

This paper will illustrate and articulate how Talanoa, a pan-Pacific concept, could offer a more culturally appropriate research methodology to disasters, seen through a Samoan lens. Talanoa is an informal conversation that is widely shared among Pacific communities based on pure, authentic and real conversations which are crucial elements in building relationships with Pacific communities (Vaioleti, 2006).

This paper proposes a way of reflexing on how we think within critical disaster studies. It focuses on the biases and unthought dimensions of two concepts – resilience and development – and reflects on the relationship between theory and practice in critical disaster studies.

Premised on the idea of epistemic reflexivity developed by Pierre Bourdieu, and drawing on previous research, this theoretical article analyses two conceptual biases and shortcomings of disaster studies: how resilience builds on certain agency; and how development assumes certain political imagination.

The article argues that critical disaster scholars must reflect on their own intellectual practice, including the origin of concepts and what they do. This is exemplified by a description of how the idea of resistance is intimately connected to that of resilience, and by showing that we must go beyond the capitalist realism that typically underlies development and risk creation. The theoretical advancement of our field can provide ways of thinking about the premises of many of our concepts.

The paper offers an invitation for disaster researchers to engage with critical thought and meta-theoretical reflexions. To think profoundly about our concepts is a necessary first step to developing critical scholarship. Epistemic reflexivity in critical disaster studies therefore provides an interesting avenue by which to liberate the field from overly technocratic approaches and develop its own criticality.

This paper will challenge normative disaster studies and practice by arguing that thriving communities require the pursuit of imperfection and solidarity. The authors use Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass World as a lens to critique both how disasters are understood, and how disaster researchers and practitioners operate, within a climate-change affected world where cultural, political and historical constructs are constantly shifting.

The paper will undertake an analysis of both disasters and disaster studies, using this unique (and satirical) critical lens, looking at the unfolding of systemic mistakes, oppressions and mal-development that are revealed in contemporary disasters, that were once the critiques of Lewis Carroll’s Victorian-era England. It shows how disaster “resilience-building” can actually be a mechanism for continuing the status quo, and how persistent colonizing institutions and systems can be in reproducing themselves.

The authors argue the liberation of disaster studies as a process of challenging the doctrines and paradigms that have been created and given meaning by those in power – particularly white, Western/Northern/Eurocentric, male power. They suggest how researchers and practitioners might view disasters – and their own praxis – Through the Looking Glass in an effort to better understand the power, domination and violence of the status quo, but also as a means of creating a vision for something better, arguing that liberation is possible through community-led action grounded in love, solidarity, difference and interconnection.

The paper uses a novel conceptual lens as a way to challenge researchers and practitioners to avoid the utopic trap that wishes to achieve homogenized perfection and instead find an “imperfect” and complex adaptation that moves toward justice. Considering this idea through satire and literary criticism will lend support to empirical research that makes a similar case using data.

This paper is a critique of Western modernity and the problems and promises of postmodernism in (re)liberating disaster studies. It criticizes metanarratives and grand theories of Western discourses to advance postmodern discourses in disaster studies.

This paper outlines a conceptual domain through which approaches of postmodernism can be employed to (re)liberate disaster studies.

Metanarratives and grand theories frame the scope and focus of disaster studies. But the increasing number and the aggravated impacts of disasters and environmental challenges in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are proofs that our current “frames” do not capture the complexities of disasters. Postmodernism, in its diversity and various meanings, offers critical and complementary perspectives and approaches to capture the previously neglected dimensions of disasters.

Postmodernism offers ways forward to (re)liberate disaster studies through ontological pluralism, epistemological diversity and hybridity of knowledge.

The agenda of postmodernism in disaster studies is proposed in terms of the focus of inquiry, ontological and epistemological positionalities, research paradigm, methodologies and societal goals.

This paper argues that extractivist logic creates the environmental conditions that produce “natural” hazards and also the human conditions that produce vulnerability, which combined create disasters. Disaster Risk Creation is then built into the current global socio-economic system, as an integral component not accidental by-product.

As part of the movement to liberate disasters as discipline, practice and field of enquiry, this paper does not talk disasters per se, but rather its focus is on “extractivism” as a fundamental explanator for the anthropogenic disaster landscape that now confronts us.

Applying a gender lens to extractivism as it relates to disaster, further highlights that Disaster Risk Management rather than alleviating, creates the problems it seeks to solve, suggesting the need to liberate gender from Disaster Risk Management, and the need to liberate us all from the notion of managing disasters. Since to ‘manage’ disaster risk is to accept uncritically the structures and systems that create that risk, then if we truly want to address disasters, our focus needs to be on the extractive practices, not the disastrous outcomes.

The fundamental argument is that through privileging the notion of “disaster” we create it, bring it into existence, as something that exists in and of itself, apart from wider socio-economic structures and systems of extraction and exploitation, rather than recognising it for what it is, an outcome/end product of those wider structures and systems. Our focus on disaster is then misplaced, and perhaps what disaster studies needs to be liberated from, is itself.