Rather than treating resilience as a fixed capacity or an endpoint to be achieved, the book approaches it as something 'lived': an open and evolving process entangled with everyday practices of becoming.

By foregrounding women’s experiences, the book also draws attention to dimensions of recovery that conventional approaches can overlook. Women’s everyday practices, embodied labour, emotional relationships and aspirations provide a different perspective on what it means to rebuild lives following disaster.

In doing so, the book challenges often neoliberal and technocentric approaches to recovery, which can give less attention to the emotional, embodied and relational dimensions of reconstruction. Instead, it shows how a feminist ethics of care can broaden understandings of resilience and recovery.

Through evocative writing and women’s photo-mediated narratives, Disaster Recovery through Women’s Eyes brings these experiences to the foreground. It presents recovery not simply as a process of rebuilding or returning to what existed before, but also as a process of creation, self-formation and hope amid loss.

This perspective offers a way of understanding resilience as an open project that is constantly in the making. It also provides a grounded basis for considering more ethical and ‘care-full’ approaches to reconstruction that foreground the importance of everyday knowledge, relationships and practices of care.

The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students in disaster studies, gender studies, anthropology, development studies and environmental studies, as well as researchers interested in creative and photo-based social science methods.

It also offers insights for practitioners and policymakers rethinking how communities are governed during and after disasters, including how women’s perspectives and practices of care can be more meaningfully incorporated into recovery programmes.