• Disasters · Jul 2009

    Putting houses in place: rebuilding communities in post-tsunami Sri Lanka.

    • Kanchana N Ruwanpura.
    • School of Geography, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom. k.n.ruwanpura@soton.ac.uk
    • Disasters. 2009 Jul 1; 33 (3): 436-56.

    AbstractThis paper interrogates the social and political geographies of resettlement and reconstruction of temporary and permanent shelters, which are fundamental to rebuilding tsunami-affected communities. War and ethnic cleavages are an endemic feature of Sri Lanka's social polity, and uneven development processes in the country are clearly visible. This paper draws attention to these spaces of inequality by drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation carried out in Eastern and Southern Sri Lanka. It argues that communities' concerns and anxieties regarding displacement and resettlement have tended to be articulated against prevailing fault lines of war and inequality. This is the backdrop against which communities negotiated the recovery process. My fieldwork shows that it is critical to understand that disaster and development relief are ingrained within context specificities. Relief efforts therefore need to recognise that the process of 'putting houses in place' should be embedded within local social relations.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…