In Pursuit of the Plan: Ordering Devices in Disaster

Forensic uncertainty, fragile remains, and DNA as a panacea: an ethnographic observation of the challenges in twenty‐first‐century Disaster Victim Identification

“…I used autoethnography in my research and I define my methodology as this, rather than ethnography alone, to allow me to disentangle and incorporate the role that I also play as a responder in DVI settings since this has a huge impact on aspects like access and gatekeeping 11. In this study, I aimed to order, document, and understand the lessons to be learned from recent incidents and exercises and to make particular use of science and technology studies (STS) when developing my approach to observing disaster (Easthope 2018). When undertaking autoethnography studies, I pay close attention to the everyday and to the tiniest parts of practice, such as the placement of a rib bone within a wider skeletal structure.…”

Inclusive recovery planning for incremental systemic change: A methodology, early outcomes, and limitations from the Falkland Islands' Covid‐19 recovery planning experience

“…We propose viewing the after‐disaster space as a complex system, through the lens of ‘wicked problems, social messes’ (Conklin, 2005; Horn & Weber, 2007). The widely used Disaster Management Cycle, presenting some combination of stages of prevention, preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation in a repeating loop has received important critiques, notably regarding its ‘closed loop’ nature, where recovery serves to return the process to its original point, rather than to a new position, and regarding the separation of activity into temporally distinct stages , which are in fact causally interrelated (Coetzee & Van Niekerk, 2012; Easthope, 2018). Further, if disasters are ‘totalising events’ and their impacts are ‘culturally constructed and socially experienced’ (Oliver‐Smith, 2015), instead of top‐down, closed, command‐and‐control approaches, we need ways of thinking and planning that are responsive to, and can accommodate the multiple experiences and sense‐making of affected communities (Imperiale & Vanclay, 2021; Ruszczyk, 2019).…”

“…Further, if disasters are ‘totalising events’ and their impacts are ‘culturally constructed and socially experienced’ (Oliver‐Smith, 2015), instead of top‐down, closed, command‐and‐control approaches, we need ways of thinking and planning that are responsive to, and can accommodate the multiple experiences and sense‐making of affected communities (Imperiale & Vanclay, 2021; Ruszczyk, 2019). From a complex human systems perspective, planners, policy makers and implementers operate in complex, evolving spaces of historical, messy human relations in materially and symbolically unequal contexts (Easthope, 2018). Planners work with ‘messy’ risks, probabilities, changing environments, growing situation awareness, multiple communities, to craft a ‘good enough’, imperfect, and often contested response in an unpredictable, nonlinear process.…”

“…We propose viewing the after-disaster space as a complex system, through the lens of 'wicked problems, social messes' (Conklin, 2005;Horn & Weber, 2007). The widely used Disaster Management Cycle, presenting some combination of stages of prevention, preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation in a repeating loop has received important critiques, notably regarding its 'closed loop' nature, where recovery serves to return the process to its original point, rather than to a new position, and regarding the separation of activity into temporally distinct stages, which are in fact causally interrelated (Coetzee & Van Niekerk, 2012;Easthope, 2018).…”

Post-conflict reconstruction in the Middle East and North Africa region: A bidirectional parametric urban design approach

“…Although the ever-increasing disasters hitting urban centres with dense populations forced international organisations to rethink the way they prepare and respond to the needs of affected communities in urban settings, their base documents have not yet caught up with the realities of urban shelter, cultural capital or time implication of interventions post-disaster, in different urban or rural areas. 14 The urban environment presents complex institutional landscapes and multi-layered social and spatial structures. Development agencies and humanitarian actors are still working on a robust understanding of such structures, local politics and social relationships in order to engage effectively with (rather than on) the sites of disaster (Benbih, 2016).…”