ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how narratives and images produce post-disaster realities connecting discourses to policy and practice. The authors offer a visual graphic of the social (re)production of disasters that reveals the interplay between the discourse production of diverse communities of discourse, the social construction and constitution of disaster recovery, and their manifestations in the lives of disaster survivors. They show that the image of disaster is constructed through other frames that have been previously circulated, such as extreme poverty or weak governmental institutions. The authors discuss contested discourses of disaster and recovery, including the dominant frames of a “new Haiti” and “building back better” and the promise of sustainable disaster recovery. They identify the social and political agendas underlying these discourses and unveil their divergent meanings, assumptions, and implications, including disaster capitalism. Throughout the chapter, the authors suggest that some of these constructions and discourses have a direct and explicit link with action orientations, while others serve as rhetorical facades to rationalize and legitimize practices that serve the needs of elite actors through the machinery of the disaster industrial complex.
