Search results

This paper aims to highlight the roles of sudden change and social disruption in the disaster landscape that shapes the environment of tourism destinations when hazards intersect with human systems.

This paper draws on the social science literature on disasters and crises. To this end, this paper provides an overview of the role abrupt changes have in transforming the tourism and hospitality industries.

This paper serves as a call to seek bold solutions that bring about industry best practices while fostering local community stakeholders in a more integrated way to build a more resilient future.

The disaster landscape provides opportunities to advance new structures, norms, cultural beliefs and collaborations that can foster resilience. This paper highlights the need to integrate resilience in the form of disaster management, recovery and organizational continuity strategies in the post-COVID-19 hospitality and tourism industries.

The paper's primary goals are three‐fold: to explore how disaster tourism serves as a vehicle for self‐reflection in respect to how the disaster tour affects the tourist; to understand how cultures adapt to abrupt change; and to understand how the tourism industry can lead to the cultural and economic revitalization of devastated areas.

This paper draws on sociological theory, experience, and participant observation to complete an autoethnographic study of a “disaster tour” in and around the New Orleans, Louisiana, metropolitan area.

Conveying information via auto‐ethnographic disaster tourism helps readers develop an understanding of others by being immersed in the tour experience. Placing the researchers in the midst of the analysis presents a perspective of the cultural mix of New Orleans as place set apart, even among places in the south. Finally, this study highlights the importance of a rapidly rebounding tourism industry by “branding” New Orleans as a “Come back city.”

Because the research employs an auto‐ethnograpic approach, it may not be possible to duplicate the observations and findings, which are subject to the interpretations of the reader.

The contribution of this work to the literature is its highlighting of the flexibility of the tourism industry after a catastrophe and noting that tour guides frame the reconstruction process as “signs of hope” and “rebirth,” rather than a city in decline. Readers come to understand that the key to the revival of New Orleans is how disaster tourists understand the disaster as well as the recovery process.

This chapter explores the local narration of gendered experience of disasters in two iTaukei (Indigenous Fijian) communities, Votua and Navala, both located in the Ba River catchment, Fiji. The methodology consisted of semi-formal interviews, talanoa, mapping sessions and journal entries from community members in Votua and Navala. Local narratives of post-disaster response and recovery in the aftermath of 2016 Tropical Cyclone Winston showed that women were not perceived as embodying a heightened vulnerability to disasters in comparison to men in either Votua or Navala. Rather perceptions of vulnerability were based on the experiences of those who physically struggled, such as people with disabilities, the elderly and those who had lost their homes. While gender roles and responsibilities underlay perceptions and gender relations, the roles and responsibilities were predominantly perceived as changing over time, either to a more shared sense of responsibilities or a shift from male responsibilities to female. This shift may lay the foundations for future changes in vulnerability and experiences towards disasters.

This paper introduces a model of social repair to the language of disaster recovery that potentially provides a new way of conceptualizing reconstruction and recovery processes by drawing attention to the dismantling of structural inequities that inhibit post-disaster recovery.

The paper first engages with the current discourse of vulnerability reduction and resilience building as embedded within a distinct politics of post-disaster recovery. The concept of social repair is then explored as found within post-conflict and reconciliation literature. For application within the context of natural disasters, the concept of social repair is modified to have evaluative and effectiveness significance for disaster recovery. A short case example is presented from post-flood Pakistan to deepen our understanding of the potential application and usage of a social repair orientation to disaster recovery.

The paper recommends that the evaluative goals of post-disaster recovery projects should be framed in the language of social repair. This means that social relationships (broadly defined) must be restored and transformed as a result of any disaster recovery intervention, and relationship mapping exercises should be conducted with affected communities prior to planning recovery interventions.

Current discourses of disaster recovery are rooted within the conceptual framings of reducing vulnerabilities and building resilience. While both theoretical constructs have made important contributions to the disaster recovery enterprise, they have been unable to draw sufficient attention to pre-existing structural inequities. As disaster recovery and reconstruction projects influence the ways communities negotiate and manage future risk, it is important that interventions do not lead to worsened states of inequity.

The purpose of this paper is to organize the issues that arise during repair processes when the cultural heritage sites and the infrastructure of local residents are simultaneously damaged by disasters and to propose measures before disaster occurrence.

Issues to be considered regarding restoration processes are extracted based on details of damages and restoration work caused by disasters to the world heritage site “Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range” and the surrounding living facilities and hearings from government officials.

In order to develop a restoration method with little burden on cultural properties, it is important that related institutions collaborate before the occurrence of disasters and consider reconstruction methods with low environmental impact. The authors should increase the number of effective countermeasure options that prioritize harmony with nature and scenery preservation prior to disasters.

Little is known about the best practice of reconstruction work at the cultural heritage sites.

The damages and restoration works which are described in this paper serve as a precedent of recovery works from future disaster occurrence.

The damages and restoration works of Yokogaki-toge Pass, the issues extracted and the measures proposed which are presented in this paper would be helpful the people involved in cultural properties to think about better methods of restoration.

In the hearing investigation clarified that both the person in charge of cultural property and public facility management recognize importance learning from many effective countermeasure methods and previous cases to make a better recovery plan for future damage.

This conversation highlights the need to rethink how we approach disaster risk reduction in different South Asian contexts.

This paper is based on the webinar held as part of Asia Week at the University of Copenhagen which was organised by Asian Dynamics Initiative and Copenhagen Centre for Disaster Research on the September 12, 2023.

The prominent themes emerging from this conversation represents hybridity, self-rule and self-recovery. Along with this we suggest a fundamental turn to ensuring hope, solidarity and empathy is part of a post-colonial future.

The conversation contributes to the ongoing discussions on moving away from colonial practices in disaster risk reduction and disaster studies broadly.

This paper describes the educational experiences of children and youth (aged 3–20) with disabilities during school closures resulting from the 2017 Northern California wildfires. Students with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to the adverse impacts of disaster, yet the effects of school closures on these children remains understudied. This study identifies considerations for students with disabilities and their families post-disaster.

An inductive, qualitative approach was used for the study design, methodology and analysis. In-depth interviews were conducted with parents of 14 students with disabilities about their experiences during and following school closures. All of these children had missed between a week and over a month of school as a result of the wildfires. Thematic analysis was used to code data and identify four themes present across the data.

Our findings indicate that children and youth with disabilities experienced disruptions in school-based services; lost previously acquired skills; exhibited negative health and behavioral issues; had difficulties adapting to new, unfamiliar routines and were saddened by lost social connections. Additionally, findings pinpoint the importance of social connections while schools were closed, the benefits of resuming school which included access to responsive school staff, as well as challenges faced by children with disabilities and their families once schools reopened.

Families of children with disabilities, as illustrated in this study, often must transverse a different post-disaster landscape. Schools should assist them in navigating that landscape so students with disabilities can experience a more equitable return to education post-disaster.

Scholars of disaster have discussed how place attachment affects the disaster landscape. The rupture of self from home, of familiar into strange and disconnected is explored through this lens. I propose in this paper that it is possible that what we are seeing is not a sudden disruption of place attachment, but an ongoing process of alienation.

In this paper I discuss the concepts of both place attachment and alienation. In particular I explore Marx’s concept of alienation. I then look at examples from disaster research and identify instances and concepts that can be better interpreted as an ongoing process of alienation.

I find that, when using Marx’s framework of alienation, we can take examples from disaster studies that might appear as a sudden disruption of place attachment and critically examine them as cases of alienation.

This exploration of disaster theory offers a new framework for bringing together urban theory, in particular critical urban theory, with disaster research.

This paper argues that extractivist logic creates the environmental conditions that produce “natural” hazards and also the human conditions that produce vulnerability, which combined create disasters. Disaster Risk Creation is then built into the current global socio-economic system, as an integral component not accidental by-product.

As part of the movement to liberate disasters as discipline, practice and field of enquiry, this paper does not talk disasters per se, but rather its focus is on “extractivism” as a fundamental explanator for the anthropogenic disaster landscape that now confronts us.

Applying a gender lens to extractivism as it relates to disaster, further highlights that Disaster Risk Management rather than alleviating, creates the problems it seeks to solve, suggesting the need to liberate gender from Disaster Risk Management, and the need to liberate us all from the notion of managing disasters. Since to ‘manage’ disaster risk is to accept uncritically the structures and systems that create that risk, then if we truly want to address disasters, our focus needs to be on the extractive practices, not the disastrous outcomes.

The fundamental argument is that through privileging the notion of “disaster” we create it, bring it into existence, as something that exists in and of itself, apart from wider socio-economic structures and systems of extraction and exploitation, rather than recognising it for what it is, an outcome/end product of those wider structures and systems. Our focus on disaster is then misplaced, and perhaps what disaster studies needs to be liberated from, is itself.