Doctoral Dissertation Research: Successive Disasters, Resilience, and Household Asset Management

While the COVID-19 pandemic has brought a range of regulations that exacerbated existing housing tensions or created new ones, households already living in conditions of socio-economic hardship or burdened by recovery from previous disasters have been particularly affected. This doctoral dissertation focuses on post-disaster asset allocation, specifically on housing and titles, to understand not only how humans respond to disasters and subsequent initiatives, but also how they create mechanisms for future resilience. It seeks to analyze whether demographic differences in homeownership influence outcomes in socio-economic capacity, social relations, decision-making, and personal autonomy after a disaster. The COVID-19 dimension offers a rare opportunity to analyze the factors associated with capacities to withstand different shocks. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student, this project will also engage a wider audience by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations and policymakers invested in disaster relief.

This ethnographic project centers on three neighborhoods devastated by successive disasters (a natural disaster, followed by COVID-19), and received differential post-disaster support. Post-disaster housing is explored as a site for analyzing the intersections between macro-level processes (disasters and subsequent initiatives) and their micro-level effects (intra-household dynamics). The researcher will collect data through participant observation, a survey and semi-structured interviews, to analyze a) how has the well-being of households been influenced by their degree of participation in post-earthquake initiatives; b) how does the response to COVID-19 and associated regulations affect intra-household dynamics; and c) how does successive disaster experience affect varied individual capacities and responses to the pandemic. The project offers the opportunity to gain comparative insights into how social relations are reconfigured within households and communities amidst successive disasters. The collected data will contribute to the anthropology of disasters, households, and assets. Focusing on social relations at the intersection of housing and disasters, close attention to COVID-19 will enhance the anthropological understanding of the social impact of epidemics.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.