The unintentional marginalisation they have experienced during the process of recovery happened because the humanitarian and development interventions created short-term programs and ignored the women's long term needs to integrate with their community.
Rather than give them protection, dignity and guidance to return into their 'normal' life these interventions rather reduced them to 'bare life' (Agamben, 1998), which put them in specialised programs but disregarded their needs to connect with their community. I argue in my thesis that the emphasis on establishing newly disabled women as independent individuals resulted in their marginalisation and alienation in their interaction with the community and confined them to prolonged isolation in their village homes. The programs of relief and long-term recovery overemphasised the individualisation, independence and self-reliance of these 'victims' rather than tap into cultural and social resources that were potentially available to them (Reindal, 1999). Examining the disaster and post-disaster experiences of those women, I argue that the disability-focused humanitarian and development intervention of that emergency contributed to the disempowerment of the women in their home, family and neighbourhood. This study is based on 14 months' ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the period of January 2015 to March 2016, during which time the newly disabled women were in the phase of long-term adaptation of their lives after the earthquake. This thesis examines both disaster and disability experiences of newly disabled women who are wheelchair users as a result of injuries they sustained in the 2006 earthquake in Java. The difference between these streams of explanation is resolved in the case of the more pious by either denying the spirit world, or otherwise resolving them in various ways by unifying the categories of God and the spirit world. Parallel to these explanations at all levels run appeals to God and His mercies. All these social units are seen as porous, and care must be taken to protect them from deleterious outside influences. Explanations similarly vary from specific individual offences, to communal household or community culpability, and national-level disasters like tsunamis and volcanic eruptions that are blamed on the activities of gods and spirits. Rather than being a uniform phenomenon, adversity can be conceptualized as happening on the individual, the household, the community, and the state levels. In East Java this is commonly done with reference to the spirit world and to God, with only occasional appeals to modern science. Social constructions of reality must account for adversity and calamities.
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