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Paper short abstract:

This paper contributes to the panel theme of 'critical hope' and transformation as necessary societal responses to the interconnected threats of climate change, disaster risk and uneven development. It explores post-disaster conscientisation as a pathway of such transformations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on Paolo Freire’s theory of conscientisation to understand pathways and expressions of citizenship formation in a post-disaster context, as evidence of ground-up social transformation. The paper draws on a case study of tsunami-affected communities in the Andaman Islands, South India. Against the islands’ history of state dependency and political disenfranchisement, the paper observes an emergence of heightened political activism and civil society engagement in the years post-tsunami. Geographies of relief and reconstruction contributed to this in several ways: (i) uneven distribution of aid/housing served as a socio-spatial magnification of pre-existing inequalities, exclusions and hierarchies, exacerbating contestations over the equity of business-as usual development; (ii) heightened exposure to state institutions and funding rendered the state more visible and navigable than before; and (iii) the mass arrival of rights-based civil society organisations provided a “language of rights” for local people to articulate pre-existing injustices. The paper observes that post-tsunami rehabilitation contributed to an emergent praxis of citizenship formation wherein local people felt motivated and able to seek out the state in new ways, and in turn were empowered by their performance of political agency. This praxis powered a positive cycle of reflection-action-empowerment, wherein altered imagined social contracts fed (and were fed by) shifts in practiced social contracts. These findings contribute new theoretical understanding of the implications of post-disaster interventions for emergent imaginaries and performances of citizenship. Beyond disasters, it identifies geographies of conscientisation as a valuable lens on social transformations at the scale of the political self.