On the 25th April 2024 we launched Halin ai.. Bamban Kada Babuah, a comic that explores the diverse impacts of urban flooding on communities including women, older people, people living with diffabilities, and informal workers including bin pickers and food and market vendors.
Illustrated and storyboarded by Ariel, and coloured by Zaldi, the comic brings to life lived experiences shared by people living in riverside communities in the city of Banjarmasin in a series of creative workshops led by GENERATE in 2022.
Facilitated by Ariel, these creative workshops invited participants to draw and illustrate their experiences of urban flooding, combining creative expression with discussion and critical reflections on the ways in which social, economic and environmental injustices intersect in their lives to exacerbate the impacts of flooding.
The participants represented a community integral to the social infrastructure that feeds and cleans the city, yet who are excluded from decision-making, urban planning, and disaster risk-reduction processes. They are, however, on the frontline of increasingly unpredictable weather and hazards, living at the intersections of climate, environmental, and social injustice.
These workshops, and the comic itself, explore the different ways in which people experience and navigate the everyday challenges of increasingly frequent and rising tides and floodwaters and unpredictable weather that disproportionately impacts their health, homes and livelihoods.
The comic highlights, in particular, the experiences and perspectives of people living with diffability. We adopt here the term difabel (differently-abled), which was derived by Mansour Fakih and Setiadi Purwanta in Indonesia to critique the term disabilitas (disability), which perpetuates and re‐produces the marginalisation of people with disabilities and fails to recognise (or normalise) the diversity of abilities.
The comic aims to foreground the diversity of individual experiences as they encounter and navigate structural inequalities and injustice, highlighting how flooding intersects with gender, age, diffability, poverty, and other structural factors. We have been using it as a tool for engaging communities and stakeholders from city government to mobilise more inclusive and transformative approaches to disaster risk reduction and climate change.
It was launched in partnership with our Kayuh Baimbai diffability-inclusive disaster preparedness toolkit on 25th April 2024.
The comic has been published in Banjar, Bahasa Indonesia, and English.
(Text shared here is borrowed from our 2023 articles: ‘Hanya ada Satu Kata: Lawan! On decolonising and building a mutual collaborative research practice on gender and climate change, Gender & Development, 31:2-3’ and ‘Halin ai: Intersectional Experiences of Disability, Climate Change, and Disasters in Indonesia, Social Inclusion, 11:4’. https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/article/view/7105.)