Memory Politics after Disaster: Recovery, Embodied Trauma, and the Covid-19 Pandemic

This article critically approaches disaster ‘recovery’ in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic through the notion of embodied trauma. We explore concepts of embodiment and trauma and ask how embodied traumatic memory differs, particularly in relation to a staggered global event such as the Covid-19 pandemic where trauma was embodied in raced, classed, and gendered waves. In contrast to the mostly technocratic mainstream disaster recovery literature, we argue that different and often polarised embodiments of trauma within disaster survivor populations reveal the aim of ‘recovery’ in the form of going ‘back to normal’ to be questionable. In this article we therefore integrate and interrogate disaster recovery literature and alternatively suggest that disasters work to remind us that there is no fundamental coherence to what we call social reality. We argue that embodied traumatic events are political: they disrupt the dominant narrative and status quo it sustains. Given this, recovery in the form of healing—or forgetting—is not necessarily what we should be aiming for. Instead, we argue that disasters such as the Covid-19 pandemic can open up the possibility for political activism, radical systemic change and a new social-political order.