“Get a kit, make a plan, be informed.” This is the standard mantra grounding practice and research related to individual preparedness as an intended direct translation to disaster response. However, money and human lives/effort are wasted as they generally do not help us to anticipate or understand what happens to communities after hazard events. Countless dollars have been thrown into such a belief about preparedness reflected in those commands. The underlying assumption is: if people are knowledgeable and have the resources to be subsistent, they will contribute to overall community resilience in the face of hazard events. The intent is good, but the conceptualization problematic and inherently prejudicial in that it puts blame on those who do not follow such orders (Baker & Grant; Ludwig 2016). It is the collective task as those invested in the management of crises to capture potentials of the public, in the advancement of more a humanistic and equitable society, rather than uphold the paternalistic status quo of emergency management.
Disaster preparedness and response, as currently conceived, results in a fundamental misunderstanding of the capabilities of publics on the part of management institutions dominated by mechanistic and/or authoritarian approaches. The remedy to these intellectual and practical problems begins with an expansion of how preparedness, response, recovery and resilience are theorized to identify: 1) how people behave in disasters, 2) improvised use of tools and technologies in the moment and over time, 3) socio-technical constructions of disaster pasts, presents, and futures, 4) how these imaginations translate to human action, 5) who becomes neglected within institutional approaches to disaster management as events unfold, and 6) how marginalizations become co-constructed within these systems.
Mainstream disaster research, while well-intended, is stuck in its constant reiteration of preparedness and resilience as the only story. Scholarly work rooted in a marriage of theoretical concepts and in-the-moment participatory research is one way to move beyond this treading of water. Emergency management should evolve from paternalistic approaches to ones that consider and respect the power of collective action. We illuminate such relevant processes through navigating Harvey contexts. Our work details the lived experience of disaster and trace them as a lived-phenomenological experience as it unfolds, for both institutional actors (like first responders, media, scientists, etc.) and publics, including ourselves, as participant observers.
Disaster science could look much different if collective actions of citizenry were taken as a given, rather than a surprise, annoyance, or potential harm. Our findings focus on a revised, empirically co-constructed, multi-storied, non-linear and dimensional examination of disaster in-practice. Here, these would be essential components of disaster contexts, rather than further recycling of calls to build ‘resilience’ as crucial, given the propensity for marginalization of this approach. Our research resonates with the theme of the panel as we co-produce theoretical and practical findings with those intimately involved in the storm. Furthermore, we incorporate students (some who were citizen-volunteers) in the research, to assist in data collection analysis, and ultimately in the creation of scholarly and practical outputs.
