dr. KZ (Kaira Zoe) Canete

Biography

Dr. Kaira Zoe Alburo-Cañete is a Filipino feminist scholar with training in Anthropology and Critical Development Studies. She is currently Senior Researcher at the Humanitarian Studies Centre at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is also adjunct lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and an Editor of Journal of Disaster Studies. She approaches the study of humanitarian governance through the lens of the ‘everyday’, particularly with a feminist perspective. Having worked for more than 15 years as an academic, a development practitioner, and as a women’s rights advocate (in the Philippines, in Australia, and now in the Netherlands), Dr. Alburo- Cañete has developed a keen interest in understanding the everyday politics and ethics of living with, responding to, and recovering from disasters and other forms of crises. She has an upcoming book, Disaster Recovery through Women's Eyes: Reimagining Resilience based on a critical ethnographic account of women's experiences of disaster reconstruction in post-Yolanda Tacloban City, Philippines.

She completed her PhD in Development Studies at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) in 2021, where her research won the Dean’s Award for Outstanding thesis. She also won the John Legge Prize for Best Thesis in Asian Studies awarded by the Asian Studies Association of Australia.