In her research, Bittel draws upon social capital, sustainable recovery, and sustainable development frameworks to explore the processes at play in complex humanitarian emergencies that produce disparate long-term recovery outcomes in communities in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. In comparing two different ethnoreligious communities, her work explores how vulnerable populations call upon global connections and engage with religious institutions to leverage bonding, bridging, and linking social capital in different ways throughout recovery processes to produce vastly different recovery outcomes in the context of violent civil conflict.

This talk focuses specifically on the rapid rise of the tourism economy in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province, to critically interrogate how recovery projects and tourism development co-occur and to highlight the implications for socio-cultural structures as communities work to integrate tourism into already-vulnerable social systems. This presentation draws upon ongoing ethnographic fieldwork (2013-present) with community members and leaders, religious leaders, local, district, and federal officials, and stakeholders from the NGOs which managed recovery-related projects. In this presentation, Bittel will discuss her ongoing fieldwork that explores the fallout from the 2019 Easter Day terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka, which brought tragedy to both field sites, and presents a host of new questions about the value and benefits of international linkages and the potentials for political transformation as the country recovers from the most violent attack on civilians since the end of the war in 2009.

Elizabeth Bittel is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at SUNY Cortland. She earned her PhD in Environmental Sociology from University of Colorado Boulder in 2019 where she conducted research at the Natural Hazards Center. She is currently working on an ethnographic monograph about Disaster Recovery in Sri Lanka, work which has been generously funded by the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the National Science Foundation. 

Photo: The destroyed Fisheries Society headquarters in Navalady, Sri Lanka