Critical Disaster Studies: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812224825 ISBN 13: 9780812224825

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

This book announces the new, interdisciplinary field of critical disaster studies. Unlike most existing approaches to disaster, critical disaster studies begins with the idea that disasters are not objective facts, but rather are interpretive fictions—and they shape the way people see the world. By questioning the concept of disaster itself, critical disaster studies reveals the stakes of defining people or places as vulnerable, resilient, or at risk.

As social constructs, disaster, vulnerability, resilience, and risk shape and are shaped by contests over power. Managers and technocrats often herald the goals of disaster response and recovery as objective, quantifiable, or self-evident. In reality, the goals are subjective, and usually contested. Critical disaster studies attends to the ways powerful people often use claims of technocratic expertise to maintain power.
Moreover, rather than existing as isolated events, disasters take place over time. People commonly imagine disasters to be unexpected and sudden, making structural conditions appear contingent, widespread conditions appear local, and chronic conditions appear acute. By placing disasters in broader contexts, critical disaster studies peels away that veneer.

With chapters by scholars of five continents and seven disciplines, Critical Disaster Studies asks how disasters come to be known as disasters, how disasters are used as tools of governance and politics, and how people imagine and anticipate disasters. The volume will be of interest to scholars of disaster in any discipline and especially to those teaching the growing number of courses on disaster studies.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andy Horowitz is Assistant Professor of History and the Paul and Debra Gibbons Professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Jacob A. C. Remes is Clinical Associate Professor of History at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introducing Critical Disaster Studies
Andy Horowitz and Jacob A. C. Remes

Scholars have come to accept the once controversial maxim that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. The causes and consequences of disaster are not defined by an autonomous natural order, nor are they inevitable. Rather, they are bound up in human history, shaped by human action and inaction. The recognition of this truth does not close the book on the study of disaster, of course. It does, however, demand new books that take it as their premise, not their argument. This is such a book.
So here is a new idea: there is no such thing as a disaster.

There are floods and earthquakes, wars and famines, engineering failures and economic collapses, but to describe any of these things as a disaster represents an act of interpretation. The first principle of critical disaster studies is the insistence that "disaster" itself is an analytical conceit.

It is a conceit that suits our age. In the context of the climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, and a seemingly endless barrage of spectacular human failures and devastating human suffering, disasters increasingly captivate observers. They offer lenses that can bring contemporary life into clearer focus.

This book reflects the efforts of a group of scholars to consider a new generation of research on disasters and to chart a course for future study. We find common cause under the banner of "critical disaster studies," even as our individual research agendas span at least seven disciplines and four continents. The "critical" part of critical disaster studies signals a critique of dominant intellectual traditions. The questions we ask, and the kinds of answers we seek, distinguish our research from the applied work in the field of disaster risk reduction and much of traditional disaster studies in general. Existing research often assumes the category of disaster as an objective given and aspires to a technical analysis of achievements and failures—while treating political and historical context as, at best, just another variable in the matrix. Our approach is to do the opposite. We do not take disasters, as a thing in themselves, for granted. We find context essential. Therefore, although we often seek to understand one particular event, we do so by widening the frame to perceive the social surround.

This introductory chapter sets out three core principles of critical disaster studies, a foundation on which we hope future scholars will build: disasters are interpretive fictions, disasters are political, and disasters take place over time.

Disasters are interpretive fictions. As both events and ideas, disasters are socially constructed. Therefore, so are concepts that are closely associated with them, such as vulnerability, risk, and resilience. These all demand interrogation because, as Pranathi Diwakar shows in Chapter 6, the question of who and what are imagined as vulnerable, at risk, or resilient has considerable political and material significance.

One of our central contributions is to demonstrate how much can be learned by bringing new tools of analysis to bear on events that have been studied mostly by people who think of themselves primarily as analysts of disaster. To be sure, we engage with the field of disaster studies, such as it is, gratefully calling on a century's worth of scholarship. Several chapters in this book—especially those by Scott Gabriel Knowles and Zachary Loeb (Chapter 1), Ryan Hagen (Chapter 2), and Kenneth Hewitt (Afterword)—describe some of the courses that tradition has taken. But we purposely have not situated ourselves in its mainstream or any of its various tributaries. The field has a set of venerable concerns, such as how to categorize different types of disaster, how humans behave under stress, and how communities rebuild from destruction. Nonetheless, the scholars whose work comprises this book often came to the study of disasters as a way of trying to answer different, broader questions about power and inequality, community and trauma, nature and society, order and instability, and the cultural beliefs that shape people's uneven experiences of misfortune.

The breadth of the unified bibliography at the back of this volume demonstrates the disciplinary diversity that critical disaster studies brings together. As historians, we are attentive to how disasters exist in time; as geographers, we are attentive to how disasters exist in space; as anthropologists, we are attentive to how the meanings of disasters are constructed; and as political scientists, we are attentive to how those meanings are constructed within political systems and contexts. Taken together, this collection offers a vision of critical disaster studies less as a disciplinary destination than as an interdisciplinary intersection. Disasters, so-called, should not be set aside for study only by a single subfield. Rather, they present productive occasions for scholars across the humanities and social sciences to think together.

Disasters are political. As social constructs, disaster, vulnerability, risk, and resilience shape and are shaped by contests over power.

Managers and technocrats often herald the goals of disaster response and recovery as objective, quantifiable, or self-evident. In reality, the goals are subjective and usually contested. Take the basic concept of "restoring order"; it seems common sense until one recognizes that the existing order served some people much better than it served others, and its restoration therefore represents a power play par excellence. Critical disaster studies attends to the ways powerful people often use claims of technocratic expertise about vulnerability, risk, and resilience to maintain their power. So-called experts have politics and ideologies, just like everyone else. We can only understand their actions if we apprehend their motivations.

We are especially wary of the easy technocratic solutionism that seeks engineering solutions to political questions. Many of the chapters in this volume examine the governance of disaster and risk as a set of both practices and discourses. They demonstrate that policies that promise security for some often cause suffering for others. They demonstrate, too, how success is ideologically defined. Consider "resilience." This is a thoroughly political concept: it asserts the goals of a community's response to a disaster—conservative goals, to be sure, as "resilient" means a durable status quo—and also creates the conditions in which the community attempts to reach those goals. Technocratic plans promulgated in the name of "resilience" often reproduce existing inequalities, usually by design, and many such plans exacerbate them. Critical disaster scholars do not necessarily reject the goal of resilience, but we do caution against naive definitions of what the concept entails.

At the same time, critical disaster studies takes seriously the actions and ideas of those usually not considered experts. Those closest to the trouble often have the sharpest perceptions of what went wrong and what can make it better. We privilege these lived, on-the-ground, and local experiences of disasters and the lay epistemologies produced by them. Their visions of recovery are rarely narrow or technical. If resilience is to mean anything, it must be resistance; it is a political outcome, not a technocratic or biological one.

Our scholarship is applied, but in a different way from the technocratic perspective that suffuses disaster studies. Critical disaster studies does not aspire to bullet-pointed knowledge of best practices. Often the best things we can do as scholars of disaster is to understand the politics and experiences of people who are most at risk and to join their efforts to build more just, equal, and safe...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812224825
• ISBN 13: 9780812224825
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 273
• Herausgeber: Remes Jacob A. C., Horowitz Andy
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande