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Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)

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smoke from a volcano in Guatemala, Photo by Caitlin Wynne on Unsplash
The UCL-PUC Resilience project is jointly run by University College London and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago. In this project – led by Professor Stephen Hart, Pro-Vice-Provost Latin America at UCL and the Senior Partnership Manager (Americas) Tomoyo Miyakawa – we are analysing the function and meaning of resilience in a number of test-cases in the modern world, with a special focus on Latin America. A number of questions have emerged:
  1. What’s the best way to measure the resilience of a community’s infrastructure (its buildings as well as its emergency support structures) when faced by climate change and pressurized by economic disadvantage, and how can we increase that resilience?
  2. How can we measure a community’s resilience in the face of natural and man-made disasters, i.e. the ability of individuals to bounce back after a disaster after a pandemic, for example, and how can we enhance that resilience?
  3. Where does human resilience come from?
  4. What happens when we use hermeneutic paradigms from another discipline to explore our traditional understandings of resilience?

To answer questions like these we realised that we needed to use a variety of approaches, hence this project’s interdisciplinary approach, and analyse resilience within a variety of different spatial contexts – hence the decision to work with researchers in Chile where researchers have a long record of dealing with natural disasters such as earthquakes.

Image: Acatenango, Guatemala, photo by Caitlin Wynne on Unsplash