Introduction. Recovery, resilience and repairing: for a non-reductionist approach to the complexity of post-disaster situations

Résumé En

The introduction reviews the most relevant existing approaches to the study of recovery after disaster. It introduces a framework that is based on the analysis of repair processes and dispositifs, which is grounded in the assumption that any disaster situation is marked by the uncertainty of its 'what-ness'. This 'what-ness' depends on the diversity of actors experiencing its consequences and their involvement in a variety of processes of acknowledging, evaluating and managing these consequences at different scales. From this perspective, researching processes of recovery consists of following how the disaster and its consequences are made the object of a variety of struggles around the meaning of what happened and how it affected the given order of things and the possible future. The chapter illustrates how this approach overcomes some of the limitations of a recovery analysis framework that is based on the notion of resilience, pointing to the need to explore the multiple meanings of repairing environments in order to explain how communities recover after disaster. The chapter also highlights three different meanings of repairing in the field of recovery: repairing as redress, repairing as technical fixing and repairing as the everyday maintenance of one's own world in material, multispecies, experiential and emotional terms.