Reimagining Schools Through a Post-Disaster Lens

Reimagining Schools through a Post-Disaster Lens (RESADL) will take the lead in affirming the field of educational research on disasters in Europe. It will fill a major lacuna in empirical research on education and disasters: the lack of a holistic perspective on school roles in post-disaster settings, and the conditions shaping them. Its overarching questions are: What school roles are suspended, enacted, contested and imagined in post-disaster settings, and what accounts for their convergences or divergences across multiple post-disaster sites in Europe? This capacious focus illuminates which school roles are practised, and which muted or resisted in the wake of disasters. Equally, it opens the possibility of reimagining schools for the future. Research will be carried out in 12 case study schools located in six countries that have been severely affected by disasters in the recent past: Spain and Germany by floods in 2024, Slovenia and Greece by floods in 2023, and Turkey and Croatia by earthquakes in 2023 and 2020. The project will widen the methodological scope of educational research related to disasters by using both conventional and participatory methods with diverse research participants. Based on a comparative, case-study approach rooted in an ‘ethics of care’, RESADL will make theoretical advances by producing a new conceptual framework of school roles and theorizing the puzzle of their convergences and divergences in post-disaster settings. This framework will encapsulate multiple, interconnected levels of analysis—from the individual to the organizational, as well as broader social, political and economic contexts, with attention to historical specificities. While RESADL’s main output will be academic, in a spirit of reciprocity, its legacy will include a policy brief and a school self-evaluation guide for advancing post-disaster school resilience.