Bibliography on disasters and trauma

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Rebecca Jarman

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Aug 29, 2025, 7:53:41 AMAug 29
to Disasters and Applied Anthropology
Hi all,

I'm currently writing a piece on how performance can create access to lived experiences of disaster that might be silenced in other means (e.g. testimony, narrative). 

Does anyone have recommendations for reading on disasters and trauma, the limitations of memory, and/or empathy for disaster survivors? 

More context for the work is here: https://mountainsmoving.org/

Much appreciative, 
Rebecca 

Prof. of Humanities, University of Leeds, UK
r.s.e....@leeds.ac.uk

AJ Faas

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Aug 29, 2025, 7:42:51 PMAug 29
to Rebecca Jarman, Disasters and Applied Anthropology
Hi Rebecca,
  This sounds like an interesting project. In an upcoming piece, I cite some important works by Puerto Rican artists and scholars whose work I think aligns with what you are looking for. See below, with references included. I have a more recent piece on disaster memory and memorials that I believe speaks to your interest, at least in parts, but it's admittedly a bit niche. Happy to chat and share more.
Cheers,
 a.j.
Puerto Rican activists and artists took to the streets to perform guerilla theatrical productions like ¡Ay María!, which narrates the confrontation with a storm that triggered a choreography of imperialist domination, politics of deservingness, the breakdown of goods and services already devastated by imposed austerity measures, disaster capitalism, and the banal malignance of FEMA emergency management (Carbonell et al., 2019; see also Marston-Firmino 2019). Playwrights, performers, DiaspoRican poets, and healthcare workers engaged in the work of care, community, political activism, and mutual aid (González, 2022; Mulligan and Garriga-López, 2020). They performed for each other in acts of mutual recognition and care—as strangers resisting estrangement—and they performed for a wider world that otherwise could not or would not see or recognize what made disaster for them. These are spaces and relationalities that should not only inspire a politics of disaster (and decolonization, antiracism, and anticapitalism), but which should inform our reading of the production of vulnerability.

Carbonell, M, Gómez Cuevas, M., Gutiérrez, J. L., Hernández, J. E., Negrón, M., Pérez Otero, M., and Villarini, B. (2019) ¡Ay María! Translated by Valle Schorske, C. del. In Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, edited by Bonilla, Y., and LeBrón, M., pp. 38-62. Haymarket Books, Chicago.

González, M. (2022) Colonial Abandonment and Hurricane María: Puerto Rican Material Poetics as Survivance. eTropic 21(2), pp. 140–161.

---(2020) Mitigating Disaster in Digital Space: DiaspoRicans Organizing after Hurricane Maria. International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters 38(1), pp. 43-53.

Marston-Firmino, A. (2019) The Storm Next Time. Theater 49(1), pp. 3-5.

Mulligan, J. M., Garriga-López, A. (2020) Forging Compromiso: After the Storm: Activism as Ethics of Care Among Health Care Workers in Puerto Rico.” Critical Public Health 31(2), 214-235. DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2020.1846683. 


A.J. Faas, Ph.D.
Professor & Graduate Coordinator
Department of Anthropology
San José State University



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