Ethics in aid and being in a quandary: writing and engaging ethically during post-disaster engagement and commitment

A central problem in disaster narratives lies not only in the scale of damage but also in who is affected and how suffering is shared and witnessed (Alburo-Cañete, 2024; Barrios et al., 2020; Matthewman and Uekusa, 2021; Petryna, 2002). This raises questions about what becomes visible when attempting to describe the seemingly trivial, unspeakable, or unclassifiable aspects of disaster and aid contexts. Rendering emotional experiences in academic prose risks their dismissal as merely personal or insignificant. Takamori argues that when the sense of “being in a quandary” remains unarticulated, the subtle ways in which communities shift through research are flattened, limiting meaningful engagement (Takamori, 2023). Addressing this challenge requires reflection on how such narratives circulate within scholarly discourse and the wider public.

Researchers often enter the field seeking objectivity but encounter discomfort, guilt, or the urge to avert their gaze from others’ suffering (Kleinman et al., 1997). These tensions are not only epistemic but also ethical, implicating the researcher’s accountability. Such experiences can weaken the dialogical nature of writing, raising questions about what is written, for whom, and with what responsibility. In post-disaster contexts, these tensions are further shaped by structural constraints. Following the Great East Japan Earthquake, Numazaki (2012) criticized “parachuting anthropologists,” arguing that representation is never neutral and often reproduces power asymmetries.

Previous studies have highlighted the importance of supporting and caring for responders (Quevillon et al., 2016; Reynolds and Wagner, 2007), yet significant gaps remain. Most research focuses on first responders (Lanza et al., 2018), medical professionals (Brooks et al., 2016; Naushad et al., 2019), and nurses (Hirano, 2018) who arrive from outside affected areas. Far fewer studies examine individuals who are simultaneously affected and engaged in support. Limited work considers such dual-positioned actors and ethics, including medical professionals (Shoji et al., 2019), care workers (Iwasaki, 2013), and local government staff (Daimon and Atsumi, 2018). However, non-professional residents, who are both affected and involved in support, remain unexplored.

Also, the researchers’ own turmoil remains underexplored, even in studies addressing bodily and affective experiences of grief, loss, and recovery. The researchers’ embodied positionality and entanglement in such contexts are often backgrounded. Researchers tend to refrain from writing in ways that overlap their bodily and emotional experiences with those of interlocutors (Abeysinghe and Leppold, 2023; Abeysinghe et al., 2025; Schobert et al., 2023), likely due to ethical reflexivity. Yet, can the researchers’ bodies—inevitably resonant with others—and their memories be adequately treated as merely private? Or might such embodied resonances open new possibilities for thought, representation, and intellectual inquiry?

Recent disaster scholarship treats positionality as an ongoing practice that must be reworked in relation to specific contexts. Friedrich et al. (2025) caution that positionality statements can become formulaic or even harmful when detached from local relationships and inequalities. They propose vignette-based writing to show how researchers are involved in the field and how they seek to reduce harm.

Building on this, this study develops “swirling” as an iterative writing practice of returning to vignette-like fragments and re-situating accounts. Swirling conceptualizes authorship as continuously negotiated under conditions of obligation and uncertainty, enabling ethical narration without reducing experience to fixed meanings or premature moral judgments. It also entails an ethical orientation toward being affected, aligned with “vulnerability as ethical practice” (Jakimow, 2022), while resisting the conversion of affect into extractable data or moral authority.

This study offers a speculative reflection on writing from two perspectives. First, it examines how researchers’ own accounts can be reworked through reflexivity and self-interrogation. Second, it explores the practice of assembling field notes and fragmentary accounts that resist conventional academic form to articulate the experience of being in a quandary. In simple terms, we show how to write ethically from within post-disaster engagement rather than from a detached distance. “Swirling,” thus names the iterative process of revisiting encounters and adjusting what can be said as responsibilities and relationships evolve.

Drawing on Critical Disaster Studies, which frames disaster areas as “interpretive fictions” (Remes and Horowitz, 2021), this study adopts an interpretivist approach, in which social realities are understood as produced through meaning-making rather than grounded in an absolute telos of justice. Ontologically, realities are multiple and socially constructed. As Chilisa and Kawulich (2012, p. 10) argue, “Reality is, therefore, mind-dependent and a personal or social construct.” Accordingly, knowledge is situated and partial (Crotty, 1998), and interpretivism enables an in-depth understanding of context-specific situations. Methodologically, this approach emphasizes reflexive qualitative inquiry focused on individuals or small groups. The study, therefore, draws on ethnographic approaches suited to engaging with complex, evolving realities.

Contemporary ethnography foregrounds the researcher’s experience, reflexivity, and positionality (Behar, 1997; Marcus, 1998; Pillow, 2003). Writing about fieldwork—despite its challenges—helps illuminate the tensions underlying ethnographic practice (Ateljevic et al., 2005; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Forber-Pratt, 2015). Ethnography thus allows space for vulnerability, exposure, and being affected.

In this study, we approach writing as an ethical practice rather than neutral reporting (Laidlaw, 2014). This involves ongoing judgment about what can be said, to whom, and at what cost. Writing ethically entails engaging with interlocutors’ divergent expectations while acknowledging the non-neutrality of representation (Chao, 2024). It also resists reducing encounters to fixed interpretations or predefined theoretical frames, instead maintaining openness, ambiguity, and attentiveness to affect without converting it into moral authority (Biehl, 2013).

In this study, the ethnographic approach (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019) included participant observation, interviews, and field notes. For clarity, we use “we” to present our shared analytic voice as co-authors, and use “I (Author A)” or “I (Author T)” only when describing author-specific, first-hand experiences or fieldnotes.

Feminist ethnography (Davis and Craven, 2016) foregrounds power across differences and engages what Pillow (2003, p. 187) terms “uncomfortable reflexivity,” where discomfort becomes a resource for ethical and critical inquiry rather than a self-congratulatory gesture. This is reflected in author A’s field notes:

Influenced by the notion of “victim sovereignty” (Fukuda, 1924; Uchio, 2018), we sought to act respectfully while also grappling with how to articulate our own discomfort. As Nakamura (2024) notes, denying asymmetry is itself misleading. Echoing Stevenson (2014), our research remained within ongoing uncertainty, continually asking “Who are we in this research?” Recognizing this positionality, the interviews were conducted with an awareness that both participants and researchers may be affected and placed in vulnerable positions.

Friedrich et al. (2025) argue that vignettes can reveal the ethical and relational complexities of disaster research while avoiding reducing positionality to a fixed identity statement. Similarly, Stevenson (2014) describes “song” as a way of being in relation with participants, while Nakamura (2024, p. 30) frames this as being “allowed to exist while being recognized without being fixed in ‘who’” (authors’ translation). These perspectives informed our approach, prompting ongoing reflection on our role as researchers.

Building on recent methodological discussions that treat positionality as an ongoing practice rather than a one-off disclosure, we engage vignette-like fragments drawn from field notes, volunteer encounters, and interviews to examine how ethical tensions are experienced and narrated.

McLean and Leibing note that while ethnographies illuminate findings and theoretical contributions, much remains in the shadows: what is concealed from the ethnographer, what is intersubjectively awkward or unspeakable, and what remains fragmentary, partial, and in process (McLean and Leibing, 2008).

In this study, swirling treats this not as a limitation to be resolved but as a condition for accountable writing. It frames treatment revision, hesitation, and re-situating as integral to remaining answerable to the field, including participants, relationships, and institutional expectations that shape post-disaster life. Conceptualized as an accountable narrative practice, swirling contributes to disaster research in three ways. First, it reframes positionality as something enacted through iterative re-situating rather than resolved through disclosure. Second, it shows how vignette-based writing can reveal ethical and moral considerations, including power differentials, without reducing positionality to a static identity statement (Friedrich et al., 2025). Third, it offers a vocabulary for writing from within quandaries that resists both objectification and moral closure while sustaining analytic rigor and ethical accountability.

In what follows, we use vignette-like fragments not as illustrative anecdotes but as sites where swirling becomes traceable as a method. We show how unsettled engagement is written, revised, and re-accounted for under shifting expectations and obligations, and how this practice enables ethical writing amid the complexities of post-disaster engagement.

We write from distinct, unevenly positioned trajectories into post-disaster engagement. Author A, a female second-year master’s student at that time of fieldwork, entered the field through an affective and practical commitment rather than a pre-planned research design. With limited prior fieldwork experience, she learned of a close friend’s experience during the Noto disaster through social media and was initially engaged by providing material support (collecting and delivering relief goods). As relationships deepened, her role shifted toward listening-based engagement and participant observation focused on everyday life during recovery. In parallel, she co-initiated a small community fund to support local youth and undertook more intensive field engagement in August 2024, while maintaining ongoing communication with key interlocutors. This trajectory shaped her intellectual orientation toward critical disaster research grounded in the ethical and affective challenges of sustained engagement.

Author T, a male fixed-term postdoctoral researcher specializing in the anthropology of disasters, entered Noto with prior experience in intermittent fieldwork in flood-prone areas of Sri Lanka, as well as earlier disaster-related volunteering and interviews in Japan. In February 2024, he participated in volunteer activities and developed relationships with organizational staff and residents in Nanao. Since then, he has continued to revisit the organization and remain in contact, combining ongoing volunteering with ethnographic attention to the relational and moral dimensions of post-disaster recovery.

Neither author was from the Noto region and initially entered as external researchers; however, our positioning shifted through relational entry points and sustained commitments. Author A’s friend-mediated engagement and co-initiated community fund created relational proximity that brought obligations and expectations, while Author T’s organization-mediated volunteering produced a different insider/outsider position. These shifting proximities shaped access, what could be asked, and what could responsibly be written, including when withholding or anonymization was necessary to protect relationships and interlocutors.

Across both cases, positionality is not treated as a static identity statement but as a relational and evolving engagement that shapes what can be asked, heard, recorded, and written. This orientation informs our analysis of “swirling” as writing from within post-disaster quandaries (Gaillard, 2019).

This study examines survivor-supporters in Suzu City and the pain of the ethnographer in Nanao City, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. “Survivor-supporters” refers to individuals who move between the positions of survivors and supporters, that is, across the inner and outer slopes (Miyaji, 2014). The “pain of the ethnographer” refers not only to the challenge of representing and understanding the cultural Other, but also revisiting moments of perplexity, regret, or longing encountered during fieldwork, and exploring the possibilities and limitations of such affective knowing and “vulnerable writing” (Nakamura, 2024). The study draws on two ethnographic cases conducted separately by the authors and subsequently brought into dialog through collaborative analysis and writing.

Author A engaged intermittently between March and August 2024, combining in-person encounters with online interviews and follow-up dialogs as relationships evolved. Author T participated in disaster volunteer activities for two weeks between February and March 2024 in Omaki, Nakajima Town, Nanao City. This study adopts a patchwork ethnographic approach (Gökçe and Watanabe, 2024), assembling knowledge across different tempos and modes of engagement, including short-term volunteering, return visits, and online exchanges, while attending to how relational obligations and place-based expectations shape what can be asked, recorded, and written.

In Author A’s case, access was facilitated through Miyabi, a close friend affected by the earthquake, and residents in Takaya, Suzu City. Fieldwork centered on listening-based engagement and follow-up conversations with individuals connected to local support networks. In Author T’s case, engagement was mediated through a volunteer organization in Omaki, involving both requesters of support and volunteers and staff engaged in daily recovery activities. Ethnographic interviews were conducted as conversational exchanges, with prompts gradually introduced to elicit context-specific insights while maintaining trust and openness. The study combined participant observation with semi-structured interviews using open-ended questions focused on participants’ roles, experiences, and perceived challenges in survivor support.

Materials include field notes, activity logs, and vignette-like fragments from volunteer encounters and interviews, and verbatim transcripts where recordings were available. Most names and identifying details have been anonymized. Identification is used only in exceptional cases where participants explicitly consented and where it was deemed appropriate after assessing potential risks.

Consistent with our conceptualization of “swirling,” we treated vignette-like fragments not merely as illustrative anecdotes but as analytic sites. Through cross-author discussion, we examined how these fragments reveal what could be asked, said, and written across the two cases, with particular attention to moments of hesitation, obligation, and contested expectations.

In case A (Suzu/Takaya), Author A’s engagement began through Miyabi, who shared real-time updates on Instagram following the earthquake and sought support for securing food, sanitary supplies, and other necessities for evacuation settings. Initial involvement focused on collecting and delivering relief goods, later developing into listening-based engagement with people connected to Takaya.

In case T (Nanao/Omaki), Author T engaged through volunteer networks and joined an organization operating in Omaki. Activities included documenting needs, retrieving belongings from damaged houses, assisting with debris sorting, supporting community interactions, and coordinating relief distribution under conditions of limited administrative support.

On January 1, 2024, at 4:10 PM JST, a major earthquake struck the Noto region (Japan Meteorological Agency, 2024). Officially named the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake, it resulted in 489 deaths and damage to 149,724 houses (Disaster Management, Cabinet Office, 2024). The magnitude 7.6 earthquake triggered a tsunami that affected coastal areas. Ground uplifts severed water pipes, causing outages that impacted approximately 110,000 households (NHK, 2024b). These disruptions persisted for months, hindering recovery, with insufficient seismic protection identified as a contributing factor (MLIT, 2024; NHK, 2024a). In September 2024, torrential rains in the Oku-Noto region caused additional flooding, further delaying recovery.

The disaster directly shaped both authors’ engagements. Author A was affected through a close friend living in Takaya, Suzu City, while Author T’s involvement developed through a volunteer center in Nanao City connected to a personal contact.

The Noto Peninsula, facing the Sea of Japan, is characterized by rugged ria coastlines that closely connect infrastructure and environment. Despite its designation as a national park with significant cultural and tourism value, the region faces high disaster risk and demographic aging. In Suzu City, 51.7% of the residents are aged 65 and above (Ishikawa Statistical Information, 2021), far exceeding the national average (approximately 30%).

In contrast, the Omaki area in Nakajima Town, Nanao City (approximately 180 people across 77 households), experienced complete disruption of essential lifelines, including electricity, water, gas, and telecommunications. In the immediate aftermath, the community was largely isolated from external assistance. While some residents evacuated to nearby areas or urban centers, others remained, spending several nights in the community center or in their cars under uncertain conditions.

The following ethnographic moments are presented not as clear-cut findings from a hypothesis-driven study, but as reflective analytic sites through which swirling becomes traceable as method.

A critical issue arose in a conversation between Miyabi and her friend, Aya. Media, inspectors, and visitors repeatedly sought accounts, often without compensation. Aya described the burden as follows:

Truth-telling entails risk not only for the speaker but also for the listener. The risk lies in being ethically addressed—having to respond, take responsibility, or reconsider one’s assumptions —while also being implicated in how such narratives are circulated or used (Gaillard and Gomez, 2015). From this perspective, survivor-supporter narratives function as socially consequential truth claims rather than merely personal stories.

For instance, Aya spoke about a contentious festival but hesitated to voice such truths publicly. Similarly, another participant, Haruka, stated:

At the same time, silence also carried meaning. Aya reflected:

Rather than reducing such pauses to trauma alone (Neria et al., 2008), Author A interprets them as signals of insufficient social listening. For parrhesia to be meaningful, listeners must be prepared to receive the difficult truths (Foucault, 2011, p. 13).

From this perspective, moments of hesitation and inarticulacy should not be treated solely as individual limitations but as indicators of broader relational and social conditions. Ethical engagement, therefore, requires recognizing the risks embedded in storytelling and the responsibilities borne by listeners.

In practice, this entails forms of listening and writing that are attentive to pacing, partial expression, and emotional limits. Ethical listening involves slowing down, accepting incompleteness, and remaining accountable for how narratives are elicited and represented (Louis-Charles et al., 2020). In this sense, truth-telling in disaster contexts is not only about creating conditions in which speaking does not harm.

In the Omaki area, lifelines failed after the earthquake, and the community center functioned as a self-organized shelter with limited external support. Volunteers coordinated debris removal, supply distribution, and recovery efforts under difficult conditions.

Author T worked alongside survivors and volunteers on physically demanding, continuous tasks. These included sorting waste, retrieving belongings, and managing debris. The work was overwhelming and sensory-intensive: decomposing food, persistent odors, and swarms of insects disrupted even basic functioning.

While sorting belongings, Author T repeatedly encountered objects that carried traces of personal histories. One moment stood out: a framed jigsaw puzzle designated as “household waste.” Breaking it down for disposal felt like dismantling accumulated time and care. Such moments resonate with Morimoto’s notion of “living archives” (2021), in which objects are not inert remnants but ongoing carriers of relationships, care, and temporality.

This moment unsettles the assumed logic of recovery itself. Rather than affirming progress, it raised questions about meaning, value, and the volunteer’s role. Feelings of disorientation, fatigue, and vulnerability emerged alongside the physical labor.

Later, in conversation at the community center, others expressed similar hesitation. A staff member noted that even experienced volunteers were unsettled, while a resident had requested that certain rooms not be cleared immediately. A student volunteer added that when she could not discard something, she chose to leave it untouched.

“Swirling” becomes visible here as the ongoing negotiation between action and hesitation, between obligation and uncertainty. It captures how engagement is continually re-evaluated in relation to shifting expectations, emotional limits, and relational possibilities.

These two moments show that post-disaster engagement is shaped not only by urgency and assistance, but also by contested conditions of truth-telling and by ethical negotiations over what can be spoken, kept, or discarded. In moment 1, hesitation and silence mark the relational limits of parrhesia and the responsibilities placed on listeners when narratives are repeatedly solicited and circulated. In moment 2, hesitation emerges not as inefficiency but as ethical judgment when “waste” carries memory, dignity, and future-making. Read as swirling, these vignettes reveal an iterative practice of returning to fragments, revising what counts as a “good” response, and recalibrating what can be said or done as obligations and expectations shift. The discussion that follows considers implications for writing with care, reflexivity beyond one-off disclosure, and for truth-telling as a shared risk in post-disaster research and volunteering.

The discussion foregrounds an ethics of writing that engages with uncertainty, hesitation, and affective entanglement, and considers what this implies for concrete practices of inquiry and commitment in post-disaster settings. Importantly, swirling is not only a way of describing discomfort; it also reshaped our research dynamics. It changed how we approached listening and recording by slowing pacing, treating pauses as communicative, seeking separate consent for audio recording, and, where feasible, checking excerpts or paraphrases with interlocutors to minimize harm. It also shifted interactional expectations from one-off data collection toward follow-up, aftercare, and negotiated decisions about what should remain unsaid or temporarily withheld.

The first concern is what it means to “write with care.” Stevenson’s Life Beside Itself (2014), situated in an Arctic context shaped by colonial health interventions and social crisis, is instructive here. Rather than treating care as a stable moral category, Stevenson attends to moments of hesitation and indeterminacy. Ethnography, in this sense, does not resolve uncertainty into clarity but remains with it as a legitimate object of inquiry. This approach aligns with the anthropology of ethics, which frames ethics as practice and attention rather than adherence to abstract norms (Mattingly and Throop, 2018).

In this study, writing with care means staying with the contradictory and unresolved practices through which survivor-supporters and researchers navigate what counts as a “good” or “right” response. Care does not appear as a clear moral action but in ambivalence, hesitation, and partial engagement. As a practice of “writing with care” that prevents theory from foreclosing “states of uncertainty and vulnerability” central to fieldwork (Garcia, 2010), we avoid using theory to heavily structure the narratives. As Nakamura (2021) suggests, ethical attention includes both turning toward others’ realities and moments of deflection. “Swirling” precisely captures this movement—between engagement and withdrawal, between being affected and stepping back.

This approach resonates with Haraway’s (1988) notion of situated knowledge and Behar’s (1997) emphasis on vulnerability in ethnography, as well as feminist disaster scholarship that foregrounds embodiment, power, and voice (Alburo-Cañete, 2024). Holding uncertainty as such destabilizes the boundary between subject and object, allowing both to exist within shared opacity (Nakamura, 2021, 2024). In the Noto case, this emerged in moments when the authors were present yet unable to fully comprehend or translate what they encountered into conventional analytical categories.

Rather than treating such moments as limitations, this study treats them as ethically and analytically significant. They align with Motta’s (2019) “ordinary realism,” which attends to lived difficulty rather than analytical simplification. As Das (2015) and Lambek (2010) suggest, ethics also involves confronting what we are already doing—not only what we ought to do. Writing with care, therefore, means recognizing that description itself has consequences: it can sustain or damage relationships.

The second strand concerns reflexivity and positionality. While reflexivity is widely emphasized in disaster research, it is not reducible to autobiographical disclosure. As noted by Alburo-Cañete et al. (2025) and Forino et al. (2024), it requires attention to how research is shaped by institutional, relational, and structural conditions. Drawing on Bourdieu, Uekusa (2024) further situates positionality within broader fields of power involving states, NGOs, the media, and local actors.

In this study, the authors’ roles as volunteers and collaborators position them within these dynamics. They are not external observers but participants navigating when to act, when to withdraw, and how to represent these decisions. “Swirling” names this ongoing negotiation: a mode of remaining with difficulty while gradually working toward response.

“Uncomfortable reflexivity” (Pillow, 2003) is central here. Rather than stabilizing the researcher’s role, it introduces unease and disrupts self-certainty. This includes moments of guilt, frustration, and incapacity—such as deciding whether to discard meaningful objects or asking participants to recount difficult experiences.

Such moments can be understood as “moral breakdown” (Zigon, 2007), in which habitual moral dispositions are disrupted, and ethical demands become explicit. In Author T’s case, the act of sorting debris exposed tensions between care and necessity, leading to a questioning of purpose itself. This discomfort is not a failure but a condition of “swirling”—a mode that keeps the researcher open to displacement and responsibility. These moments foreground the pain of the ethnographer as an inevitable condition of ethical engagement, rather than a problem to be resolved.

Similarly, in Author A’s case, parrhesia (Foucault, 2011) highlights that truth-telling requires courage not only from the speaker but also from the listener. Survivor-supporters’ narratives, therefore, function not merely as personal accounts but as socially consequential truth-claims that demand ethical response.

Taken together, these strands suggest that ethical engagement in disaster research is not abstract but enacted through everyday decisions about listening, acting, and writing. It resists reducing communities to data sources and instead foregrounds relational accountability. This resonates with recent arguments that vulnerability should not be understood as a condition to be managed, but as an ethical practice that entails becoming affectively exposed and relinquishing the privilege of distance (Jakimow, 2022).

“Swirling” should not be mistaken for indecision. Rather, it offers a practical orientation for navigating situations where urgency often overrides relational care. It suggests recognizing hesitation as an ethical signal and treating uncertainty not as a methodological weakness but as a guide for more responsive and accountable practice. In this sense, this study contributes by conceptualizing “swirling” as a form of ethical vulnerability that emerges through embodied engagement in disaster settings.

This study examines how the ethical challenges of engaging with the 2024 Noto Peninsula compound disasters can be understood and written about, focusing on the unstable position of those who are both survivors and supporters, while also considering the pain of the ethnographer that arises in the process of fieldwork and writing. The analysis shows that these challenges are not merely individual but are shaped by broader fields of power, including expectations surrounding disaster research and the circulation of disaster narratives in policy and media (Koon, 2020; Numazaki, 2012; Shineha, 2023).

Across both debris removal and truth-telling, the ethnographer is not a detached observer but is implicated in practices with ethical consequences—whether through participating in the dismantling of others’ lives or listening to and potentially recirculating narratives that demand response and responsibility, recalling the ethical risks of parrhesia for both speaker and listener. In this sense, the pain of the ethnographer emerges as not an abstract ethical concern but an embodied and relational experience of being addressed, unsettled, and entangled in others’ lives.

Against this backdrop, “swirling” captures an ethical orientation that does not seek to resolve disturbance or trauma but instead remains with it as an embodied negotiation between action and hesitation, speaking and withholding, where ethical discomfort, sensory intensity, and relational obligations are continuously entangled. It points toward forms of engagement and writing accountable not only for what is done, but also for what is heard, withheld, and carried forward.

Practically, this study calls for rethinking how disaster research, volunteer coordination, and storytelling are conducted. Interviews with survivor-supporters should be approached not as one-time data collection moments but as ongoing relationships that recognize the risks of parrhesia through careful attention to preparation, pacing, compensation, and aftercare. Similarly, programs aimed at “helping the helpers” (Quevillon et al., 2016; Reynolds and Wagner, 2007) should include non-professional residents who navigate the dual role of being both affected and supportive.

These proposals are consistent with calls for more reflexive, interdisciplinary, vulnerability- and resilience-focused, and public-facing disaster research (Forino et al., 2024; Marino and Faas, 2020) and indicate concrete ways in which such calls might be enacted. This study makes a conceptual and methodological contribution to disaster studies by demonstrating how the notion of “swirling” can inform concrete research design and post-disaster engagement practices, particularly for those working across disaster management, policy, and research.

To mention implications, for readers working across disaster management, policy, and research, “swirling” can be translated into concrete design and engagement practices. For research design, swirling implies a patchwork and vignette-based approach that treats positionality as ongoing practice: documenting moments of hesitation, returning iteratively to fragments, and making explicit decisions about what to disclose, withhold, or revise as relationships and moral economies shift. These implications bridge situated ethics and operational decision-making in societies, clarifying how public-facing disaster research can be enacted rather than merely advocated.

This study has some limitations. It centers on one region and a small group of survivor-supporters, drawing on specific relationships and the researcher’s positionality. Future research should examine whether similar dynamics unfold in other settings and explore how the practices proposed for shared authorship or narrative review might be co-designed, implemented, and evaluated with communities and institutions.

We would like to thank Dr Adam, Dr Nakamura, Miyabi, Disaster Volunteer Organization O, and the anonymous interlocutors who supported and contributed to this research.