Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"When speaking of disaster henceforth, we cannot escape the ensuing political questions this volume interrogates." * Los Angeles Review of Books *
"In a world marked by calamity, this timely volume widens the lens of our understanding by emphasizing the importance of deeply contextualized approaches to the study of disaster. The end result is a vibrant reimagination of the field and a captivating introduction to critical disaster studies." * Lori Peek, University of Colorado Boulder *
"This is a vital, iconoclastic volume that turns much conventional thinking about disaster studies on its head. The contributions are lively, geographically varied, and conceptually suggestive. An exciting and invaluable book." * Rob Nixon, Princeton University *
"An urgent, timely, and vitally important volume that deserves a wide readership. As the crisis precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic has made all too clear, this volume’s unifying themes—vulnerability, risk, resilience, and disaster—are concepts that every one of us ought to understand, grapple with, and critique." * Julia Irwin, University of South Florida *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. Introducing Critical Disaster Studies
Andy Horowitz and Jacob A. C. Remes
Part I. Knowing Disaster
Chapter 1. The Voyage of the Paragon: Disaster as Method
Scott Gabriel Knowles and Zachary Loeb
Chapter 2. Acts of God, Man, and System: Knowledge, Technology, and the Construction of Disaster
Ryan Hagen
Chapter 3. When Does a Crisis Begin? Race, Gender, and the Subprime Noncrisis of the Late 1990s
Dara Z. Strolovitch
Part II. Governing Disaster
Chapter 4. Concrete Kleptocracy and Haiti's Culture of Building: Toward a New Temporality of Disaster
Claire Antone Payton
Chapter 5. Risk Technopolitics in Freetown Slums: Why Community-Based Disaster Management Is No Silver Bullet
Aaron Clark-Ginsberg
Chapter 6. Spaces at Risk: Urban Politics and Slum Relocation in Chennai, India
Pranathi Diwakar
Chapter 7. Plan B: The Collapse of Public-Private Risk Sharing in the US National Flood Insurance Program
Rebecca Elliott
Part III. Imagining Disaster
Chapter 8. Mediating Disaster, or A History of the Novel
Susan Scott Parrish
Chapter 9. The Tōkai Earthquake and Changing Lexicons of Risk
Kerry Smith
Chapter 10. Translating Disaster Knowledge from Japan to Chile: A Proposal for Incompleteness
Chika Watanabe
Afterword. "Acts of Men": Disasters Neglected, Preventable, and Moral
Kenneth Hewitt
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
