Everyday Life “Turned upside Down”: Disasters, Future and Resilience

Abstract

Disasters change individuals and the social structure. Two categories are essential to study disasters: time and space. To these, we should add risk that is a cultural object resulting from interpretation. Its representations are subjective and they stem from the socio-cultural framework of reference. In the article, we will apply to the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy the four risk-related issues emerging by the interplay between the degree of knowledge (certain/uncertain) and that of consent (contested/complete) as in Douglas and Wildavsky. We will describe the four types of problems about the evaluation of the consequences con-cerning this health risk and we will consider the role of institutions. Since disasters disrupt the regularity and predictability of everyday life, the temporal dimension individuals ex-perience is flattened onto the present. Our conclusions reflect on the possibility to counter-act this and on available tools to foresee when constructing a future after a disaster.