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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

RoundTable

Fifty Years of Disaster Study: Changing Imperatives, Outlived Terms, New Frontiers (Part 1)

moderators

    Irena L C Connon

    Nationality: Scotland, United Kingdom

    Residence: Scotland, United Kingdom

    University of Stirling

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

discussants

    Susanna M Hoffman

    Nationality: United States

    Residence: United States

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

    Dewald van Niekerk

    Nationality: South Africa

    Residence: South Africa

    North-West University

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

    Kylah Forbes-Biggs

    Nationality: Canada/Jamaica/Ireland

    Residence: South Africa

    Durban University of Technology

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

    Beth Marino

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

Keywords:

Disaster; Risk; Climate Change; Methodologies; Concepts

Abstract:

From a fifty-year perspective, anthropology researchers in the study of risk and disaster offer a critical re-examination of the field’s development. This roundtable brings together multiple generations of risk and disaster researchers to discuss concepts that have lost their pertinence, merging dichotomies, resistant fallacies, concerns that have and have not changed, and what focuses--many new and some ever remaining -- the study needs now address. Among the approaches and terms calling for reconsideration are: progress prevention; co-opted and system evasions; new intersectionalities and victim categories; continuing theory to practice tension; the new “all” of all hazards; event/process, probability/possibility; induction/deduction as analytical methods in new in-situ circumstance; risk, vulnerability, exposure versus advancing global precarity, as well as the meaning of “theory” itself. The roundtable will also explore recent efforts to diversify, indigenize and de-colonialize disaster anthropology and new methodological innovations for doing anthropology in an age of ongoing climate disasters. Given how power imbalances remain and how superficial adoption of the language of diversification and decolonization risks enhancing their potential for abuse, the discussion will offer new insights into what it means to do ethical research and how anthropologists can attempt to do this when navigating their own precarity.