Critical Disaster Studies

Description

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. Cover Critical Disaster Studies Title Copyright CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Introducing Critical Disaster Studies PART I. KNOWING DISASTER 1. The Voyage of the Paragon: Disaster as Method 2. Acts of God, Man, and System: Knowledge, Technology, and the Construction of Disaster 3. When Does a Crisis Begin? Race, Gender, and the Subprime Noncrisis of the Late 1990s PART II. GOVERNING DISASTER 4. Concrete Kleptocracy and Haiti’s Culture of Building: Toward a New Temporality of Disaster 5. Risk Technopolitics in Freetown Slums: Why Community-Based Disaster Management Is No Silver Bullet 6. Spaces at Risk: Urban Politics and Slum Relocation in Chennai, India 7. Plan B: The Collapse of Public-Private Risk Sharing in the US National Flood Insurance Program PART III. IMAGINING DISASTER 8. Mediating Disaster, or A History of the Novel 9. The Tōkai Earthquake and Changing Lexicons of Risk 10. Translating Disaster Knowledge from Japan to Chile: A Proposal for Incompleteness AFTERWORD “Acts of Men”: Disasters Neglected, Preventable, and Moral Notes Bibliography Index List of Contributors Acknowledgments