Heo/Geo Lecture Series 2024-10: Liberty de Rivera on interrogating the rhetoric of resilience building

What comprises the right education for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)? This oft-asked question has long intrigued educators and field practitioners when viewing what builds a culture of safety and resilience among society's vulnerable sectors. 

For the latest paper presentation of the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2024, DRR will be spotlit as a global policy initiative to build resilience in hazards-exposed communities. Sponsored jointly by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) the Heo/Geo Lecture Series presents ‘Shields of the people’: Disaster Risk Reduction education for building up agents of resilience and responsibilised citizens to be presented by Dr Liberty de Rivera on Friday, 11 October 2024 at 5:30PM Philippine time UTC+8 / 7:30PM AEST UTC+10). 

For this presentation, Dr de Rivera interrogates the rhetoric of resilience building through education by investigating its contrasting features as an agentic concept and a responsibilising device. Through an ethnographic reading of DRR education programmes in Aparri town in the Philippines, she will illustrate how resilience as a polyvalent construct creates a double-bind of creating spaces for education actors and learners; participation and empowerment while legitimising patterns of deflection of responsibilities. Dr de Rivera centres the analysis on the metaphorical reference of students as Salaknib Dagiti Tattao, or shields of the people, and the designation of teachers as disaster responders to demonstrate how emerging labels and expectations about resilient citizenship must be reflexively developed and critically enacted. Inherent within these programmes are features that might depoliticise disasters and overshadow the need to uphold accountability and responsibility. 

Dr Liberty Pascua de Rivera is Vice-Chancellor Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education of Southern Cross University. Her research interests include analysing and evaluating policies and their implementation in the areas of education for sustainable development, climate change, and disaster risk reduction. Central to her research is the idea of cognitive justice—what, or whose knowledge, is emphasised, neglected, and minoritised in processes of policy cascade.

Liberty obtained her BA in Communication Research degree from the UP College of Mass Communication and her Master of Development Studies and PhD from the University of Sydney. Liberty has taught, conducted research, and engaged in development work in Singapore, the Philippines, Vanuatu, and Australia. She is the treasurer of the Oceania Comparative and International Education Society (OCIES) where she also co-leads the New and Emerging Researchers of OCIES. Liberty is an Associate Editor of the International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education (IRGEE) journal. Liberty is from the province of Apayao. She is the mother to two-year-old Kappia and partner to Ryan.

The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a space to share and exchange ideas on a wide variety of geographical topics that intersect methodologies, discourses, technologies, pedagogies, and practices. Faculty, students, alumni and local and foreign geography and geography-adjacent researchers delivered various presentations in previous academic years fulfilling one of the Department’s mission: to popularize geography as an academic discipline through research and practice. 

This presentation is sponsored through Geographies of Disasters and Hazards (G-DASH), and the Human Geography (HuG) and Media, Literary Geographies, and Geohumanities (MELANGE) research groups of the UP Diliman Department of Geography and in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goal #3 (Good health and well-being) and #4 (Quality education). 

To participate in the talk, click this link to register: https://bit.ly/3zLBSMx