Hayfaa Abou Ibrahim
Being a Public Scholar means engaging in work that is highly needed, critical and readily translatable into meaningful actions. For me, it’s a commitment to co-production, reciprocity and accountability. My research aims to improve collaboration under conditions of “polycrises.” This work only matters if it helps communities alleviate the impacts of crises and disasters.
Research description
What does being a Public Scholar mean?
Being a Public Scholar means engaging in work that is highly needed, critical and readily translatable into meaningful actions. For me, it’s a commitment to co-production, reciprocity and accountability. My research aims to improve collaboration under conditions of “polycrises.” This work only matters if it helps communities alleviate the impacts of crises and disasters. I hope that this research will help local governments, humanitarian actors and communities to collaborate more effectively to save lives, allocate resources more equitably and advocate for systemic change.
In what ways do you think the PhD experience can be re-imagined with this Initiative?
The Public Scholars Initiative allows us to re-imagine the PhD experience as a scholarship with the public, not merely about the public. It allows us to prioritize relationship-building, knowledge translation and community-engaged outputs as core research activities. This initiative also helps us to bridge the longstanding research-practice gap. For me, PSI provides the mandate and funding to extend my work beyond academic outputs and to use creative, non-traditional tools that make my findings accessible and reach broader audiences.
How do you envision connecting your PhD work with broader career possibilities?
My research focuses on how organizations collaborate in the aftermath of polycrises to deliver shelter and essential urban services. The urgency of this topic lies in the fact that shelter and essential services are not optional — they are fundamental to survival after disasters. My proposed project with PSI presents a unique opportunity that will prepare me for broader career possibilities at the intersection of research and practice. By translating my findings into accessible tools such as interactive story maps and co-produced policy toolkits, I aim to provide practical resources that humanitarian actors, local governments and NGOs can use directly to improve their work. Through this project, I will gain skills in policy translation and community-engaged methods that are highly relevant to any career, whether in urban planning, disaster governance or humanitarian response.
How does your research engage with the larger community and social partners?
My research is grounded in collaborations from the start. It closely engages with non-governmental and civil society organizations whose work supports the most vulnerable populations at critical moments during and after crises. This engagement feels especially urgent in the current world we live in, where overlapping crises are reshaping urban life. I will be collaborating with two research centres whose work is rooted in community engagement and that are committed to supporting vulnerable populations.
Why did you decide to pursue a graduate degree?
My decision to pursue a PhD is grounded in lived experience. I grew up in South Lebanon and later lived in Beirut, where recurrent crises were part of everyday life. These experiences made clear that recovery from overlapping crises is slow and uneven and that the most vulnerable bear the heaviest burdens. The 2020 Beirut Port explosion was a turning point for me. Participating in post-disaster relief and later in disaster-recovery research showed me the critical importance of collaboration in contexts of polycrisis. Working alongside local groups, I saw how a fragmented response slows help and can even cause counterproductive and parallel efforts. I realized that collaboration is as life-saving as urgent services. These experiences altogether motivated me to pursue my doctoral research on this critical topic to help strengthen these collaboration efforts. A PhD gives me the theoretical grounding and methodological tools to study the issues I care about rigorously and to translate on-the-ground practices into practical guidance. It is both a scholarly path and a personal commitment to my country and to other places facing similar, overlapping crises.
Why did you choose to come to British Columbia and study at UBC?
I chose UBC to work with Prof. Michael Hooper, whose expertise and scholarship on disaster governance and urban resilience — especially in Global South contexts — aligns closely with my interests. UBC and my department, the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), in particular, offer a strong home for transformative, community-engaged planning. SCARP’s ethos is to transform knowledge into action by planning in partnership, which matches my research’s commitment to enhancing collaboration in crisis response.
