How the English language dominates disaster research and practice

[Excerpt]

By Ksenia Chmutina, Jason von Meding, Neil Sadler and Amer Hamad Issa Abukhalaf

In 2020, many of us heard the words ‘resilience’, ‘vulnerability’ or ‘risk’ in a new context: a global pandemic. These words are frequently used when we talk about disasters, and though we probably associate such words, used in the context of being externally threatened, with our personal experience, we all comprehend them slightly differently. These and other words, such as ‘hazards’ or ‘capacities’, form professional disaster-related terminology that is used globally by researchers, NGOs, donor agencies as well as politicians; these words are consequently translated into diverse languages. Many policies and practices to secure the wellbeing of the public are focused on ‘building resilience’, ‘developing capacity’ or ‘decreasing vulnerability’.

In Colombia, for instance, ‘resilience’ has become integral to government policy for disaster risk reduction yet the word is unfamiliar to the general public. The local media has actually attempted to explain resilience in plain Spanish in order to frame stories about strength, but the translation itself is burdened by intellectual debate and neoliberal undertones. For example, whilst resilience is often portrayed by politicians as a panacea to all ills, many scholars point out that such terminology is often used to justify the transfer of responsibility for oppressive social conditions to the individual.

You can read the full version of the original article here: https://www.e-ir.info/2021/01/18/how-the-english-language-dominates-disaster-research-and-practice/