Maria Khristine Alvarez

Maria Khristine Alvarez is a student in the PhD programme of The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU) at University College London (UCL). She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Philippine Geographical Society, as well as a former spokesperson and member of the coordinating committee of #BLOCKMARCOS, an independent anti-dictatorship group fighting against the resurgence of authoritarianism in the Philippines. Khristine is the recipient of the 2018 DPU 60th Anniversary Doctoral Scholarship Award, as well as the the 2018 Gilbert F. White Thesis Award from the Hazards, Risks, and Disasters Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Her master’s thesis in Sociology at the University of the Philippines-Diliman threaded the concepts of territorial stigma, aesthetic governmentality, and territoriality in tracking the genealogy of ‘danger zone’ evictions, charting the production of the discourse of slum evictability after the 2009 Ondoy (Ketsana) floods, and explaining the phenomenon of ‘danger zone’ evictions as a technology of disaster governance and a strategy of spatial segregation and urban transformation. Her PhD research is an expansion of this previous work. Through an ethnography of the Metro Manila Flood Management Master Plan and the Informal Settler Families Housing Program, it aims to weave a critical account of ‘resilient’ city-making in Manila, and in the process theorize urban transformation and dispossession in ‘vulnerable’ Southern cities beyond processes of capital accumulation.