Everyday Life “Turned upside Down”: Disasters, Future and Resilience

• Main Authors: Emiliana Mangone, Nikolay Zyuzev
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Salerno 2020-06-01
• Series: Culture e Studi del Sociale
• Subjects: disaster; risk; covid-19; future; resilience
• Online Access: http://www.cussoc.it/index.php/journal/article/view/122

Disasters change individuals and the social structure. Two categories are essential to study disasters: time and space. To these, we should add risk that is a cultural object resulting from interpretation. Its representations are subjective and they stem from the socio-cultural framework of reference. In the article, we will apply to the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy the four risk-related issues emerging by the interplay between the degree of knowledge (certain/uncertain) and that of consent (contested/complete) as in Douglas and Wildavsky. We will describe the four types of problems about the evaluation of the consequences concerning this health risk and we will consider the role of institutions. Since disasters disrupt the regularity and predictability of everyday life, the temporal dimension individuals experience is flattened onto the present. Our conclusions reflect on the possibility to counteract this and on available tools to foresee when constructing a future after a disaster.