The Canterbury Earthquakes and the Politics of Disasters

Abstract

This chapter continues to follow the narratives of the Christchurch study participants, relating how they situated their personal experiences in a sociopolitical context. Some participants articulated a relatively developed politicized perspective that built on views that predated the earthquakes. Others had only recently become aware that the work experiences that had unsettled them were shared rather than unique, or that they fitted into a command-and-control pattern of disaster management. As they reflected aloud, participants questioned disaster discourses and identified the patterns they had observed. They expressed distress over having been, as they termed it, “put under orders” in the emergency phase. Some felt that their employers had forced them to return to work to carry out nonessential duties before they were ready. Others had been required to carry out activities they considered ethically questionable, such as facilitating the moving of vulnerable people without affording them or their families the right to self-determination. They recounted that becoming able to externalize their experiences as events occurring in systems had helped them to become better able to critically analyze situations, and to choose whether to act collectively to protest injustices.