Making Sense of Wildfire

This article explores how residents in rural Sweden experienced the 2018 forest wildfires. Using the concepts of dislocatory experiences and relocatory trajectories, it examines how disasters like wildfires disrupt meaning-making and social relations. Based on ethnographic interviews conducted from 2020 to 2021 in two rural communities, the article focuses on directly affected residents of evacuated areas and forest owners. It analyses how the wildfires disrupted their understandings of place, landscape, identity and time. The findings suggest that the wildfire functioned as a dislocatory event unfolding across a temporal dimension. It threatened material structures such as homesteads and forest areas and involved identity losses tied to people's sense of belonging in both spatial and generational terms, disrupting their orientations towards the past, present and future

Ethnography · Event (particle physics) · Identity (music) · Rainforest · Sense of place · Social worlds · Threatened species · Disaster Management and Resilience · Fire effects on ecosystems · Geographies of human-animal interactions