Our Featured Fellow for January 2024 is Yajaira I. Ayala, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Disaster Science and Management program at the University of Delaware.

Yajaira joined the Bill Anderson Fund as a Fellow in 2020. She has served on the BAF Collaborative Communities Fundraising Committees. From 2021-2022 she served as the Vice-Chair of the BAF Student Council while simultaneously heading the Fellowship Intake Committee as Chair. During the Bill Anderson Fund Lightning Talks at the 2023 Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop, Yajaira presented “Reframing Reality: A Demographic Profile of Black Women in Lake Charles, LA,” which highlighted data from her upcoming dissertation. This presentation was subsequently recorded as part of the Natural Hazards Center’s Making Mitigation Work webinar series and can be viewed here. 

Yajaira served as a member of the planning team for the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies-Bill Anderson Fund Partnership Kickoff Meeting at the 2023 Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop. This event helped Fellows explore cross-learning opportunities between researchers and representatives from non-profit and community-based organizations serving disaster-affected communities across the American Midwest. Additionally, Yajaira has recently been accepted to participate in the American Evaluation Association’s Graduate Education Diversity Internship Program, which seeks to engage and support students from traditionally underrepresented groups so that they may extend their research capacities to program evaluation.

During her time at the University of Delaware, Yajaira has worked on a variety of projects. At the E. L. Quarantelli Resource Collection at the Disaster Research Center (DRC), she explored different notions of disaster recovery in North and South America, resulting in a bilingual annotated bibliography which she has used to inform her own theoretical notions on disaster recovery. As a Research Assistant for the Composite of Post-Event Well-being (COPEWELL) project, Yajaira analyzed the role of social capital in increasing people’s resilience after emergencies. And in her work in the DRC-It! Project, she extensively explored the existing literature in prosocial behaviors during emergencies which has resulted in a deeper understanding of resilience among disaster-affected individuals.

In her dissertation titled “Reframing Reality: An Analysis of Resiliency and Vulnerability among Poor Black Women,” Yajaira explores the strategies poor Black women create and employ in the aftermath of disasters amid structural and cultural violence. The objectives of this work inform theoretical notions in the disaster field through which historically marginalized communities can frame their resilience and vulnerability. During this past summer, preliminary data was presented at the XX International Sociological Association’s World Congress of Sociology in Melbourne, Australia. Yajaira’s upcoming dissertation work has already earned two major university awards, including the UD Doctoral Fellowship for Excellence Award and the UD Gerard J. Mangone Climate Hub Award. Yajaira plans to defend her dissertation in the Spring 2024 semester and is currently in the job market. Connect with her on LinkedIn. 

Yajaira is currently focused on writing her dissertation, learning about practices to best serve communities in need, and translating research into practice. In her free time, Yajaira spends time with Gatsby, her enthusiastic Border Collie that likes to pop-up during her Zoom meetings.

Research interests: Disaster recovery; community resilience; race and ethnicity; class; structural and cultural violence.