A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
The rhetoric of disaster : searching for resilience in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina is one of the most prominent disasters of the early 21st century. The complexity of this event is reflected by multiple post-disaster narratives. However, among them, resilience is the least explored. To eliminate this lacuna, the study aims to determine how resilience is represented in a corpus of texts that emerged in the disaster aftermath. Specifically, it investigates whether these cultural products contribute to resilience development and its internalization. The latter has an enormous role in empowering communities to successfully overcome any future adversity. Using a qualitative research method, a variety of selected materials (speeches, novels, films, images, and newspaper articles) were analyzed to gain a better insight into the manifestations of resilience during and after the disaster. The results show that resilience is sporadically exhibited in the analyzed texts, while other narratives such as blame, governmental failure, and biased media coverage are more prominent. These results suggest that the positive effects that the natural and sometimes even traditional resilience a disaster can bring forth in communities is not likely to materialize in fictions and documentaries on a grander scale if the governmental as well as media structures dealing with disasters remain what they are. Instead, they corroborate the general notion that government structures are not eager to delegate their authority to community networks to deal with a crisis. On this basis, the concept of resilience should be moved from the fringes of the disaster discourse and given a central stage to achieve substantial changes in the system of disaster preparedness and mitigation.
The rhetoric of disaster : searching for resilience in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina is one of the most prominent disasters of the early 21st century. The complexity of this event is reflected by multiple post-disaster narratives. However, among them, resilience is the least explored. To eliminate this lacuna, the study aims to determine how resilience is represented in a corpus of texts that emerged in the disaster aftermath. Specifically, it investigates whether these cultural products contribute to resilience development and its internalization. The latter has an enormous role in empowering communities to successfully overcome any future adversity. Using a qualitative research method, a variety of selected materials (speeches, novels, films, images, and newspaper articles) were analyzed to gain a better insight into the manifestations of resilience during and after the disaster. The results show that resilience is sporadically exhibited in the analyzed texts, while other narratives such as blame, governmental failure, and biased media coverage are more prominent. These results suggest that the positive effects that the natural and sometimes even traditional resilience a disaster can bring forth in communities is not likely to materialize in fictions and documentaries on a grander scale if the governmental as well as media structures dealing with disasters remain what they are. Instead, they corroborate the general notion that government structures are not eager to delegate their authority to community networks to deal with a crisis. On this basis, the concept of resilience should be moved from the fringes of the disaster discourse and given a central stage to achieve substantial changes in the system of disaster preparedness and mitigation.
The rhetoric of disaster : searching for resilience in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina
Vedernikov, Sergey (author)
2021-01-01
Theses
Electronic Resource
English
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