The GRRIPP UK team have been developing a reference guide on the role of sexual and gender minorities in disasters and disaster risk reduction (DRR). A small team have been following a similar process used for the another GRRIPP reference guide developed last year but focused specifically on literature, publications and reports concerning disasters and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual and other non-heterosexual and non cis-gender people (LGBTQIA+). These are all part of the collaborative work with GDN and the original annotated guides: https://www.gdnonline.org/resources.
We’ve made an excellent start but we’re now looking for wider input.
Given the diversity of the literature out there, plus the multiple terms and acronyms used to name and describe gender and sexual minorities in various parts of the world, we would like to call on the GRRIPP and Gender Disaster Network (and beyond!) to provide us with any must-see and key pieces on this specific topic.
Some of the key phrases we’ve been searching against include:
LGBT (with numerous variations to ensure inclusivity)
Sexuality
Queer
Allyship
Gender non-conform* (with related terms incl. non-binary, gender variant etc)
Men who have sex with men
Vulnerable groups
Liminality
Queer Domicide
(cis)normativity*
SOGIESC
GSD (Gender and Sexually diverse people)
Transgender
These terms have been chosen because they provide a framework to search against. We recognise that the list above is not complete and many aspects of the gender and sexual minorities communities may be left off. Unfortunately, given the time and resource constraints within this project, we’ve had to pick the terms that we hope will give us the best results.
Using the above terms, we’ve identified a number of potential headings which we’re using when carrying out our literature review. Those draft headings are as follows:
Capacities & agency (a focus away from ‘victim’ to one of agents of change)
Community (benefit & limitations of community
Culture (i.e. decoloniality)
Data collection and handling (incl. methods employed, data storage/management, data driven research, data sharing etc)
Faith-based Organisations
Health, wellbeing and welfare
Infrastructure (digital, social & physical infrastructure)
Learning (methodologies, toolkits etc developed to increase learning on LGBT* and disasters)
Policy & legislation (where we are, how we’ve got here & hurdles in future)
Whilst the headings aren’t final, the broad themes provide a good guide on the areas we’ll be looking at.
What do we need?
Our GRRIPP Network is growing and is becoming a hugely valuable and helpful resource and so we would live to tap into that to ensure we cover as diverse a range of literature as possible.
So, we’d love for you to send us any reports, publications or other research related to this topic that you think fits in within this discussion. We’ve so far used Google Scholar and PubMed to carry out the initial reviews and we’re keen now to ensure those reports that might have been missed are included.
All you need to do is provide a link to the document in question. We’re looking for work that has been published in any language, both peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed publications and research that has been carried out or by the LGBTQIA+ community related to disasters. Because of time and resource limitations, the reference guide isn’t at this point including research focused on humanitarian action or climate change specifically.
Please send any recommended resources to us by the 3rd May to Olivia Walmsley at olivia.walmsley.19@ucl.ac.uk and Kevin Blanchard at general@drrdynamics.com, and please feel free to also contact us with any questions you have regarding the reference guide or what it is we're asking for.
Thank you for your time and we look forward to hearing from you.
The GRRIPP LGBTQIA+ Reference Guide team
(Maureen, Olivia, Kevin, Jess, Eshka & Zahra)