This book explores the politics of knowledge in humanitarianism, disaster resilience, and development practice through a collection of autoethnographic and reflective accounts by researchers, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners. Drawing on experiences across diverse institutional, cultural, and political contexts, the contributors examine how humanitarian, resilience, and development interventions are shaped not only by technical frameworks and evidence-based systems, but also by positionality, ethical judgment, emotional labor, professional identities, and everyday negotiations of power.

Positioning autoethnography as both a qualitative research methodology and a critical epistemological intervention, the book interrogates how dominant forms of knowledge are produced, legitimized, and operationalized within aid, disaster risk reduction, resilience-building, and development systems. It discusses the limits of standardized evaluation, accountability mechanisms, and technical expertise, while highlighting the significance of embodied, relational, and contextually situated knowledge.

Organized around three interconnected themes — contexts and power, identities and roles, and critical and transformative perspectives — the chapters address issues including researcher positionality, humanitarian advocacy, decolonial practice, gender norms, trauma, care, professional ethics, remote research, and institutional constraints.

By bringing personal experience into dialogue with broader structures of authority, inequality, and knowledge production, Autoethnographic Reflections on Humanitarianism and Resilience offers a nuanced contribution to scholars and advanced students in humanitarian and development studies interested in critical and decolonial perspectives on contemporary humanitarian and development practice and disaster resilience. 

Sandra Carrasco is a Peruvian-Australian academic and Lecturer in Humanitar-ianism and Development at Deakin University, Australia. Her work focuses on disaster resilience, community-based disaster risk reduction, humanitarian re-sponse, post-disaster recovery, migration, and inclusive development. She has more than a decade of research and professional experience across Latin Ameri-ca, Asia, and Oceania. She collaborates with communities, governments, NGOs, and international partners to strengthen resilience, social inclusion, and equitable development. Her research adopts participatory, people-centered approaches that value local knowledge and diversity.

Leanne M. Kelly is a pracademic scholar whose work spans development studies, humanitarianism, evaluation, conflict, disasters, and community resilience. With more than 20 years of experience as an evaluator and humanitarian-development practitioner, her research explores how civil society organizations respond to complex crises and how evaluation can strengthen evidence-informed practice. She currently holds a Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and collaborates with partners across Australia, Asia, and Africa to advance conflict sensitivity, resilience, and evidence use in crisis-affected settings.

Kirstin Kreyscher is an educator and researcher working across development studies, disasters, climate change, and conflict. Her academic work focuses on critical disaster studies examining young people’s knowledge, actions, and lead-ership in multi-hazard environments through arts-based, visual methods. She holds a research position at Southern Cross University, Australia, investigating effective child participation in climate change education, and lectures in Community-based Disaster Risk Management at Charles Darwin University.