What does it mean to compassionately and responsibly research disasters? How can inquiry into what, for most, might be some of the worst days of their lives avoid exploitation and  unilateral extraction? When do frameworks and paradigms focusing on communities’ resilience subvert oppressive power structures and when do they perpetuate them? Drawing on the firsthand experience of a former emergency responder turned disaster researcher, this roundtable contribution discusses reimaging disaster research around a community-partnership-first mentality. In its current form, much disaster research reinforces neocolonial and neoliberal systems that are themselves the primary causes of modern disasters such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and others. True partnership—more than just co-authorship, but community-partnered participatory research—can move past those failures and build knowledge for public policy in a deeply democratic way, helping to reform problematic emergency management and disaster response systems. However, policy research directly commissioned by government actors or funded by many established foundations leaves little room for these kinds of meaningful and lasting partnerships. How can new models of research leverage the resources and policymaking centrality of government while avoiding the top-down hierarchies present in expert-based emergency management and disaster response? Is such a thing even possible in research of public policy in partnership with government actors? How can community-partnered research help build the knowledge needed for a more resilient future?

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