Roberto Barrios
Roberto E. Barrios is assistant professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Barrios has conducted long-term ethnographies of disaster reconstruction in Southern Honduras after Hurricane Mitch and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. This research documented the ways expert knowledge and knowledge-making (market-based analyses, budgets as mechanisms of reconstruction project assessment, modernist and neoliberal planning) are often heralded by aid program managers, governmental officials, and professional planners as universally relevant means of helping displaced populations recover from traumatic events, and how these forms of knowledge often articulate implicit assumptions about the nature of social wellbeing, people, and communities.
Additionally, his work demonstrates how these assumptions do not always neatly map onto—and sometimes threaten to disrupt—the ways affected populations socially produce the spaces and times they live in, and the ways displaced populations shape their dispositions, sensibilities, and identities over the course of life experiences in such space-times. Consequently, Barrios’ work makes the case that recovery is experienced as a sentiment by displaced populations, that these sentiments have locality-contingent histories, and that aid agencies and governments must be sensitive to the socio-material arrangements that allow survivors of disasters to experience such sentiments.
Related Resources from Roberto Barrios
"If You Did not Grow up Here, You Cannot Appreciate Living Here": Neoliberalism, Space-time, and Affect in Post-Katrina recovery PlanningHuman Organization, 2011
