Reconstructing Nepal: The 2015 Earthquakes and their aftermath

Welcome to the research guide Reconstructing Nepal: The 2015 Earthquakes and their aftermath

This research guide is intended to provide an overview of English-language materials that address Nepal's series of earthquakes in April and May 2015, as well as the ongoing responses and repercussions of those events on Nepal's citizens, institutions, and environment. The resources compiled in this guide are available for reference to students, faculty, researchers, and community at UBC and the general public. However, be aware that some resources may require personal or institutional subscriptions, although UBC Library provides access to most of these materials. If you are having difficulty accessing materials you can visit the Connect to Library Resources page.

The broad impacts of the earthquakes are ideally viewed through multi-disciplinary lenses that draw from the widest range of scholarly, non-governmental, and governmental sources. This research guide hopes to reflect this diversity of materials by including them in separate sections found on the left-hand sidebar. Further disciplinary distinctions, where necessary, can be found within those pages.

Note*: The curators of this research guide are aware of limitations inherent in any large compilation effort, and as such this guide does not claim to be exhaustive on this topic. In particular, media resources such as op-eds are excluded because we are aware of other archiving projects in progress which are focusing on those materials. Additionally, this guide only includes English-language materials from the moment of the earthquakes in 2015 up until early summer 2018 - when the guide was published. We will continue to update this resource guide as materials become available.

Please contact us if you feel there are particular publications or materials that are missing, or if there are issues related to the organization of materials herein. Please email us at nepal.reconstruction@ubc.ca.

This research guide was created in conjunction with an ongoing three-year grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada entitled "Expertise, Labour and Mobility in Nepal's Post-Conflict, Post-Disaster Reconstruction: Construction, Finance, and Law as Domains of Social Transformation".

Led by Sara Shneiderman (Anthropology, UBC), Katharine Rankin (Geography, UofT), and Philippe Le Billon (Geography, UBC), with Aarhus University, Appalachian State University, British Columbia Institute of Technology, Social Science Baha, Tribhuvan University’s Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, and University of Toronto as partners. This multi-disciplinary study aims to understand the relationships between post-conflict state restructuring and post-earthquake reconstruction in large-scale social transformation through empirical research in the domains of construction, finance and law.

Please visit our website: https://elmnr.arts.ubc.ca/

UBC is home to a Himalaya Program that draws upon faculty expertise, student engagement, and community partnerships to create an interdisciplinary hub for sharing knowledge about the Himalayan region, including Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and the Tibetan cultural zones that traverse all of these countries. Beginning in Fall 2015, initial projects have included developing a language partner program to create opportunities for learning Nepali and Tibetan; developing a speaker and event series; and creating an interdisciplinary network across UBC and the broader Vancouver community.

The Himalaya Program and UBC Library have partnered to create a Himalayan Studies Resource Guide that introduces students, faculty, and community at UBC and elsewhere to academic resources, journals, dictionaries, and other databases about the Himalayan region.