The art of repair Disaster stories and social worlds in Durban, South Africa

As disasters become more frequent and severe, there is growing recognition that they are shaped by longer histories of inequality rather than by hazards alone. Yet we know far less about how people tell stories after disaster and the work these stories do in its aftermath. This dissertation examines the 2022 Durban floods in South Africa, the deadliest flood disaster in the country's recorded history, through four interconnected ideas, stories, rupture, repair, and social worlds. It asks how stories move through disaster, how people live with rupture, how repair becomes possible in damaged worlds, and how social worlds are made and remade in the process. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with residents of Quarry Road West, an informal settlement severely affected by the floods, and the disaster responders involved in rescue and recovery, I combine participant observation, life narrative interviews, focus groups, and arts-based methods. I show that stories were central to how people continued after disaster, placing the floods within longer histories of crisis while creating possibilities for repair. I also show how masculinity shaped vulnerability, care, and disaster response, and how responders came to sense risk through relationships with helicopters, rescue dogs, and changing environments. I argue that disasters are lived through the social worlds people create in their aftermath, where storytelling becomes a practice of repair rather than a record of past events. By bringing disaster anthropology into conversation with storytelling, repair studies, sensory anthropology, and more-than-human anthropology, this dissertation shifts attention from disaster as an event to the ongoing work of living in its aftermath.