• Situating ‘Verano Boricua’ Within Puerto Rico’s Financial Debt Crisis and Hurricane Maria Recovery Process, Christopher Tharp
• Cycles of Disasters, Long-term Recovery, and Identity: How Biloxi’s Recovery from Hurricane Katrina Started in 1969, Jennifer Trivedi

Panel description

While specific disasters are often discussed publicly as events in a relatively brief time frame, disaster researchers are well aware that disaster recovery can be a long-term process. Despite this knowledge, for a variety of practical, methodological, and even theoretical reasons, disaster research often finds itself focused on a narrower time frame. This raises a series of problems and complications for research and applied approaches, including a relative lack of information on how long-term recovery processes succeed or fail or how they are perceived over time by emergency management officials, government agencies, the media, and both directly affected and non-affected laypeople. Moreover, it means we need more extensive in-depth knowledge of how long-term cycles and repeating disasters may affect not only a population and their landscape, but also their recovery from subsequent events. Particularly in an era of climate change with potentially shifting disaster scopes and frequency, understanding how people experience disaster recovery in the long-term and how it shapes their response to subsequent events is critical to our research on disasters and application of that research.

This panel invites contributions from a range of perspectives, including: those drawn from both experiences of conducting research and the recounted experiences of people in disasters, preparedness, and recovery; those that play with realities by discussing or introducing theoretical and methodological approaches relevant to the better understanding of long-term processes; and those which imagine the future of long-term disaster research and changing experiences of cycles of disasters. Moreover, in an era of increased focus on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research, this panel invites a range of research and work perspectives, including disaster researchers situated in academia, practitioners, and people who span both spheres. This panel is conceptualized as a space to explore what we do know, but also to examine what we may not know and how various fields may contribute theoretically, methodologically, and practically to a better understanding of disaster recovery in the long-term and how it shapes people's beliefs and behaviors in other disasters.