Losing One’s self: A Case Study of Disaster Recovery Processes Through an Identity Approach

Abstract

Climate disasters are characterized by the changes delivered in their wake. Despite the mass disruption brought on by such events, it can only ever be experienced by agents. Ensued by the larger rapid environmental transition, individual agents experience en masse changes to their subjective environments. Through a Symbolic Interactionist lens, these jarring alterations to individuals’ object environments threaten their sense of self as interactional patterned continuity is ruptured. Although such micro-macro relations mark disaster processes’ innate complexity, the interplay of ‘self’ in disaster scenarios is significantly under-researched. Thus, this case study focuses on this interplay within the context of Beira, Mozambique, following Cyclone Idai (2019). Five years post-cyclone landfall, 37 semi-structured interviews were conducted among informal market vendors who experienced temporary or permanent loss of economic livelihood activities. A qualitative thematic analysis, informed by a literature review, was used to analyze the transcribed interviews and to develop a theoretical framework. The theoretical framework proposes multiple propositional relationships that inform mechanisms underpinning the disaster recovery process. To summarize, the vast changes to individuals’ object environments (composed of animate beings, inanimate things, and intangible processes) brought on through the disaster-driven rapid environmental transition may result in identity continuity challenges, leading to agency loss and past-oriented recovery trajectories, resulting in a perpetually liminal recovery process. Findings from this thesis work suggest that the proposed theoretical framework is helpful in identifying and explaining these relations. First, through a Symbolic Interactionist lens, participants’ changes to their livelihood activities, social networks, and time allocation following Cyclone Idai demonstrate significant object environment shifts, insinuating that identity continuity challenges have occurred. Second, participants expressed a positive association of normalcy with their pre-cyclone states, and a desire to return to such a state, implying a past-oriented recovery trajectory. Finally, participants demonstrated low levels of human agency which may have been brought on by failed goal attainment. These findings in combination may illuminate previously untheorized causal mechanisms that impede post-disaster recovery processes. As such, this work contributes to ongoing disaster management research and the emerging space of disaster-induced identity loss.