Rebuilding the Foundations: Political Participation and Empowered Citizenship in Post-Disaster Nepal

My dissertation project will investigate how post-disaster rebuilding affects citizens as democratic agents through three avenues: mass community participation at the individual level increased contact with the state and interaction with community organizations. I will further disaggregate these relationships to explore heterogeneous effects by gender. I propose a mixed-method approach employing IRB-approved semi-structured interviews, focus groups, survey research, and Bayesian statistics, making use of variation in earthquake damage. By designing the project in a way that speaks to the individual, household, and community-level aspects of post-disaster rebuilding, I aim to synthesize and build on important bodies of interdisciplinary research. My project thus will contribute to future scholarship in development, political science, economics, and sociology as well as to the on-the-ground application for women's empowerment and disaster relief.