Audio narratives of long-term disaster recovery and climate change adaptation

In the wake of disasters, storytelling can function as a means for collective sensemaking, trauma recovery, and community-centered knowledge co-production. Through the practice of listening and the medium of voice, audio stories can convey culturally specific knowledge that engages emotions while fostering dialogic thinking on complex topics. Here, we detail our experience in research and producing a public-facing audio story series about communities facing displacement and loss from water-related disasters. First, we traveled in 2023 to communities in the central Philippines devastated by 2013’s Super Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda), one of the deadliest and strongest storms to make landfall in modern history. We conducted field interviews with Haiyan survivors and responders, local policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in the months leading up to the tenth-year commemoration of the storm. Their narratives allowed us to ground discourses about learning from disaster in mass media and academic research—discourses that we examined via a computational analysis of over 15,000 newspaper articles and 300 academic abstracts on Haiyan. The second story series explores perspectives on climate retreat in the wake of floods and increasing flood risks in New Jersey. This series centers the voices of homeowners considering property buyouts through a state program, local officials, as well as scientists who are documenting the social and physical impacts of more intense flooding and sea level rise in real time. Titled Carried by Water and produced by Princeton’s Blue Lab, these interrelated series anchor academic framings of disaster in lived experience and first-person narratives. The project does so to shed light on long-term recovery, learning processes applied to everyday decision-making, and diverse understandings of disasters, home, agency, risk, and climate resilience.