Healing As Organizing in Solidarity Spaces: An Affective Perspective on Post-disaster Recovery

This paper examines how community-led solidarity initiatives enable healing in the aftermath of disaster. Drawing on a two-year qualitative study in post-explosion Beirut, it explores how solidarity spaces function as relational structures of repair – sites where material response and affective recovery are not separate processes but mutually constitutive ones. While post-disaster organizing research has emphasized resource mobilization and agility, and disaster studies has identified the importance of community-led recovery, neither has fully explored how organizing enables healing to unfold collectively. Addressing this gap, the study makes two contributions. First, it reframes solidarity spaces as generative holding environments: relational infrastructures that simultaneously contain suffering and enable the emergence of new social arrangements. Second, it conceptualizes healing as organizing: a distributed, collective, and enacted process through which communities transform suffering into agency. Healing, in this account, is not an individual psychological process nor an outcome that follows organizing; it is the very practice through which recovery unfolds, as participants become agents of their own material and affective transformation through acts of solidarity.