In September 2023 I touched down in Blantyre, Malawi, to start my PhD fieldwork exploring the role that humanitarian shelter response can play in building community resilience. This was six months after the devastation of Cyclone Freddy, the longest lasting cyclone on record. Malawi had been particularly badly impacted by Freddy, with nearly 700,000 people displaced and over 1,000 deaths. In response, the international humanitarian community had been activated through the Malawi Shelter Cluster to support the reconstruction and relocation of multiple affected communities. My fieldwork plan was to connect with some of these Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) that were engaged in the response, and see how their activities influenced community social resilience in affected populations.

It was in Malawi that I first met with Dr Tanja Hendriks, postdoctoral research fellow at KU Leuven, who’s project Duty and Diligence in Disasters: civil servants and the climate change crisis in Malawi is focused on the roles and responsibilities of government officials in preparing for and responding to disasters across the country. After an initial connection through social media, we found ourselves in Blantyre at the same time and were able to meet to discuss our mutual interest in the role of various external actors engaging with community members. Both civil servants and NGO staff often find themselves in similar situations when in the field supporting disaster response programmes. Both will be attempting to collect and report data on the impact of a given event. Both will be distributing relief items, often not enough, with too little time and too little support. And yet, we also began to identify some of the key differences between our experiences following our informants to visit project sites.

When I left Malawi, I knew there was still a lot more I wanted to discuss with Tanja, and so we began searching for ways to allow us to continue to work together. The IAS Open Fellowship Programme provided the perfect opportunity to bring Tanja to Loughborough for one week in January 2025. In addition to Tanja’s excellent presentation on her research at the IAS seminar, we were also able to host a playtest of the disaster governance boardgame that Tanja has been developing with Serious Game artists to help players put themselves into the shoes of actors responding to disasters in Malawi. The session was very enjoyable (and a little heated at times!), and by connecting with other disaster scholars and researchers interested in game design, Tanja was able to get feedback on the prototype, which will hopefully support its further development. We were also able to visit London to meet with colleagues at Loughborough London, as well as to allow me to meet with some of Tanja’s other collaborators in the UK at UCL and the Centre for Disaster Protection.

Thanks to the generosity of the IAS, I was able to further develop my research plans with Tanja, beginning to put together a draft of a journal article, a proposal for an edited volume that we hope to lead on, and even a potential podcast series! On top of that, I was also able to meet with other Malawi-focused researchers, both here at Loughborough and further afield, and to expand my own network alongside Tanja’s.

Without the IAS, Tanja and I would have stayed in contact and (hopefully!) met again in Malawi in future fieldtrips, but now we have had the chance to formulate a coherent plan for our research agendas together and build a wider network of interested people to engage with in order to turn some of our ideas into realities… Watch this space!

Dr George Foden, host of IAS Open Programme Fellow Dr Tanja Hendriks