ABSTRACT
It is widely recognised that social differences are (re)produced through environmental hazards, yet feminist foundations remain relatively absent from critical hazards scholarship. In this paper, we seek to deepen understandings of the experience of environmental hazards through a feminist lens of the ‘everyday’. We focus on the Amazon floodplains, where annual flooding is integral to rural livelihoods but where extreme floods can have devastating impacts. Using the 2014 flood year as analog, we analyze four facets of flood experience: (1) preparations, (2) impacts, (3) responses, and (4) social assistance. We identify livelihood- and lifeway-oriented dimensions of experience with a ‘bad’ flood and demonstrate how the two dimensions are deeply interrelated. We find that while livelihood-based impacts have longer-term ramifications (such as lost crops or lost trees), impacts associated with everyday living and survival (namely, inundated houses and illnesses) stand out to respondents as more consequential. We further identify forms of assistance embedded in village social norms and document how the lack of appropriate state assistance during the flood is viewed locally as perpetuating their marginalisation. In sum, we argue that the flood season, whether ‘normal’ or ‘extreme’ is an experience of people's ‘mundane everyday’, socially-embedded world, and intimate human-environment connections.