Ayesha Siddiqi joined the department as a Lecturer in Human Geography in February 2016. Her research focuses on climatic disasters and their interaction with politics, security and development. With an interdisciplinary background, her core research interests are around the study of political space in the aftermath of large scale climatic disasters.
Her PhD was funded by the AXA Research Fund and was based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in three post-disaster districts in southern Pakistan. It explored questions around the impact of large-scale flooding on state-citizen relations, Islamist mobilisation and an emerging social contract in the region. Ayesha’s more recent work is examining the intersection of disasters and conflict in southern Philippines. Her work uses approaches from geography, anthropology and politics to interrogate the ways in which disasters are politically and socially constructed and what this means for transformative change on the ground.
Since beginning work in this area of climate change and disasters in 2008, Ayesha has published, taught and provided a range of consultancy services in this area. She has worked as a consultant contracted by DFID to provide support on the Pilot Programme for Climate Resilience (PPCR) in Tajikistan, has provided support on a UNEP project on climate change and conflict in Darfur and most recently also on a UNISDR study examining pathways for transformation after disasters. She is also an experienced lecturer in this area, having used a range of pedagogical approaches in her teaching inside and outside the classroom.