After Maria: Everyday recovery from disaster

BACKGROUND Critical development studies reveal how popular culture and academic research often dehumanise disaster affected people (Lewis et al 2014, Tuck 2009). People are homogenised, and their personalities, voices, experiences, and personal agency are as they are portrayed as victims (Chouliaraki 2013). Tuck (2009) argues this represents a “damage-centred” approach to research on disaster-affected people. Tuck calls for “desire-based” research frameworks, whereby researchers represent the complexity and the self-determination of disaster-affected people’s lives in non-traditional formats. CONTRIBUTION ‘After Maria’ is a comic that translates findings from my one-year ethnography about disasters in Puerto Rico. It provides an example of a “desire based” research framework that represents the heterogeneity of disaster-affected people because comics create denser representations of research participants and their contexts than in text alone (Sousanis 2018). The comic also contributes to comics that are set in the global south, which highlight the personal experiences of marginalized groups and highlight their political agency. SIGNIFICANCE The comic was funded by the University of Manchester Public Engagement Fund and published via the University of Manchester. It is available to download, and 2400 physical copies were distributed to educators in US, Puerto Rico, Colombia, UK, Australia, Netherlands, Hungary, Canada, Denmark amongst others. Featured in: Illustrating Anthropology exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery, U.K; Guardian newspaper, Bluedot Festival. The comic generated opportunities to speak on podcasts: Disasters Deconstructed; Geographies of Risk, and Ask the Geographer; Northumbria University, Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Peterloo Institute, Southwest Doctoral Partnership.