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.