HSS: Can Disaster Victims Come Out to Play? ICTs and Contested Meanings of Recovery in the Wake of Typhoon Haiyan

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are a key component in government and humanitarian response in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in central Philippines. Mobile phones, radios, and solar-powered chargers are among the relief items distributed to directly affected populations, just as they are used by aid workers themselves for fundraising, disseminating information, and soliciting feedback. But while the official narrative of ICTs in disaster recovery revolves around their use to "reach and engage citizens" or "build capacity" within local communities (UNOCHA 2012), our interviews with directly affected populations of Typhoon Haiyan reveal a narrative of ICT use that is much less virtuous and more ordinary–though no less significant. In rebuilding their lives after Haiyan, disaster victims slowly reclaim ICTs back to their ordinary pre-disaster uses. Online dating, uploading selfies, singing karaoke, and watching Korean drama are just some of the practices where ICTs are used to regain and redefine ordinary life after exceptional catastrophe by enabling and even enhancing sociability, romance, and relaxation. This talk, which is based on an ongoing ethnography of aid workers and affected populations in two cities affected by Haiyan, maps out dual paradigms of ICTs for disaster recovery at play: one that emphasizes their use to transmit information in the aim of mitigating future disaster, and another that foregrounds their "ritual" functions for belonging, home-making, and ontological security. These two paradigms orient their users to somewhat different notions of time and recovery, where one is about planning for the future, while the other is about remembering and regaining what was lost. I argue that acknowledging the significance of both perspectives is crucial to nuance the technocratic, hazard-centered approach to disaster management with local vocabularies of recovery, especially in the Philippines as a "culture of disaster" (Bankoff 2003). Inspired in part by Payal Arora's essay "Can the 'Third World' Come Out to Play?", this talk engages with the key tension in humanitarian work to simultaneously attend to basic needs for human development and acknowledge local strategies for coping, escaping, and overcoming tragedy.