Isabelle Desportes
Isabelle Desportes is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch, An-Institut at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and lecturer at the RWTH Aachen. She researches the (hidden) politics of disaster prevention and humanitarian response, including in authoritarian conflict settings, and co-coordinates the Centre Marc Bloch’s research group on ‘Environment, Climate, Energy’ since October 2024.
Her current research project, DisasterLobby, is situated at the intersection of critical disaster studies and socio-ecological transformation studies. It approaches disasters as symptoms of our currently untenable societies and focuses on how diverse actors draw back on recent fires in Brandenburg (Germany) and close to Bordeaux (France) to advance their interests.
Isabelle obtained her PhD at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, in November 2020. Past academic but also non-academic work stations have been the Disaster Research Unit at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Universities of Amsterdam and Cape Town, the International Federation of the Red Cross Red Crescent in Geneva and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre in Addis Abeba.
Country/Region of interest/research focus: Sub-Saharan Africa, France, Germany