Creativity, recovery, and resilience: how the arts strengthen resilience in communities affected by disasters

Participation in arts and cultural activities builds social capital and is accepted by academics, governments and industry as a legitimate avenue for enhancing health and wellbeing. Following natural hazards, this can be seen in action within disaster-affected communities through ‘creative recovery’: arts projects across a range of art forms that are instigated after disasters to support community recovery and strengthen resilience.

Despite recognition from researchers and industry professionals that arts and cultural projects offer social benefits to disaster-affected communities, creative recovery is typically not planned for in advance. This is incongruent to the continuous provision of federal, state, and local government funding for creative recovery following disasters. A significant barrier to including arts and culture in emergency planning is that, except for reports on government-funded projects, there is a lack of academic research in this field.

This project will address this gap and seeks to understand the extent to which arts participation contributes to recovery and builds resilience in disaster-affected communities.

The research background and literature review will link analysis of creative recovery projects to established theoretical frameworks across the fields of disaster and arts & cultural research to identify known aspects of arts and cultural participation that contribute to recovery and resilience, which will then be tested and expanded via a qualitative research methodology.