Imagining the future of disaster studies

[Excerpt]

By JC Gaillard

There is a puzzling paradox in disaster studies. Many, if not most of its proponents, us, claim that disasters are social constructs. However, we, in our vast majority, resort to concepts, methodologies and broader epistemologies that we take for universal. For instance, we use and apply concepts such as disaster, vulnerability, resilience, risk, etc., which share a Latin etymology, in all sort of contexts around the world, assuming that they will help us understand how people across very diverse cultures and societies make sense of what we call natural hazards. This is antithetical.

This tension between, on the one hand, what we want to achieve, and, on the other hand, the approach we deploy to achieve this goal reflects the hegemony of Western, Eurocentric discourses on disaster. So hegemonic that they have become common sense in Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) lingo. As feminist scholar Kathy Ferguson (1993, p. 7) once said, ‘the questions we can ask about the world are enabled, and other questions disabled, by the frame that orders the questioning. When we are busy arguing about the questions that appear within a certain frame, the frame itself becomes invisible; we become enframed within it’. In disaster studies, this frame is Western and reflects a scholarly legacy that dates back to the Enlightenment and its project to free people from the hazards of nature.

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