Disaster Culture

I revisit Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “tidalectics” just weeks after the largest triple hurricane system on record has pummeled the Caribbean. It is an awful reminder of the permeability between land and sea, particularly in small islands. In this unholy trinity of Irma, José, and Maria, these mergers are violent and deadly. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres declared that Barbuda, thought to have been 90% destroyed (like Anguilla) by Hurricane Irma, became a "paradise transformed to hell." The category 5 Hurricane Maria, which destroyed the fresh water supply and infrastructure in Dominica and Puerto Rico, was thought to be the strongest Atlantic storm on record. Hurricane Irma flooded seawater as far as a third of a mile inland in Cuba. Beach sand covered the region’s major arteries, which are still unpassable in many places, weeks after the storm. Twenty-five foot waves pounded the shores, while coastal surges were measured at over six feet in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Due to the record-breaking levels of rain, an 11-billion gallon dam in Puerto Rico began to fail. Irma’s winds were so strong they literally pulled water out of the ocean and dried out beaches in the Bahamas and created watery bulges elsewhere.  In report after eyewitness report the language to encapsulate these unprecedented violent weather events fails. Instead the language of apocalypse prevails to describe what is “catrastrophic,” “precarious,” “total devastation,” and “hell.”

This article analyzes the processes of risk visualization characterizing disaster risk reduction policies and, in particular, the digital artifacts the international world of disaster management uses in an effort to view threats to the planet and render them open to human experience. The purpose of these artifacts is to foster experiences that grant both quantitative shape and social form to the nature of global risks. Tangible Earth, the first interactive digital globe, is the most sophisticated of these artifacts in that it strives to gather a wide, varied audience of humans and enroll them in co-producing the risks affecting the Earth. This process of delving into experiences of the globe as mediated by digital equipment mobilizes diverse ontologies: there is a “naturalist ontology” that represents nature as independent of the social sphere, as a force that remains insurgent and unpredictable despite efforts to quantitatively capture it through earth-monitoring instruments and probabilistic calculations, and there is also an “analogist ontology” in which nature is cast as indistinguishable from the social sphere on the grounds that both human and non-human collectives share the same propensity for resilience.

In this paper, my aim is to elaborate disability movement praxis so that transnational struggles for justice over the production of impairment emerging from the Global South can be represented within the transnational frame of disability politics. The paper seeks to explore the potential of deepening socio-political understandings of impairment as a means to radically democratize disability movement politics at the transnational scale to encompass pluralist, yet subaltern, collective claims for justice. I am guided by the question: if impairment is the place that makes visible invisible debts, can the global disability rights movement begin a process of re-identification to open the boundaries of disability justice claims and develop a strategic orientation which recognizes those collective justice claims for geopolitically produced impairments?

This booklet is an illustrated compilation of good practices and technical provisions with regard to sustainability, durability and resilience, identified within local building cultures of zones exposed to various constraints and types of natural hazards. Presented practices and technical solutions refer to ways of building, construction systems and devices, coping strategies and community practices identified by some members of the CRAterre team over several years and during projects in different countries. This document has been prepared by CRAterre, IFRC and Caritas France as part of a set of tools developed within the framework of a working group within the Global Shelter Cluster to enhance the appreciation of local practices developed by communities to adapt their housing / settlements to their specific environment, including risk preparedness. This booklet is a complementary tool to the handbook Assessing local building cultures for resilience and development. A practical guid...

Most risk management activity in the healthcare sector is retrospective, based on learning from experience. This is feasible where the risks are routine, but emergency operations plans (EOP) guide the response to events that are both high risk and rare. Under these circumstances, it is important to get the response right the first time, but learning from experience is usually not an option. This case study presents the rationale for taking a proactive approach to improving healthcare organizations' EOP. It demonstrates how the Prospective Hazard Analysis (PHA) Toolkit can drive organizational learning and argues that this toolkit may lead to more efficient improvement than drills and exercises.

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Wiley's copyright policies do not allow me to post the published version of the paper, but they do allow me to send out individual copies. So if you don't have access to the Journal of Healthcare Risk Management and would like a copy of this article, please email me at:
alan [dot] j [dot] card [at] gmail [dot] com

This article argues that, while emergencies and disasters are distressing for most people and may result in mental disorders for a substantial minority of affected persons at some time in the following months and years, there are personal and collective sources of psychosocial resilience. The concepts, bases, and practical potential of resilience have been explored for more than 40 years. However, studies of pathology, which emphasizes people’s vulnerability over their adaptive capacities, have predominated. The nature and basis of personal psychosocial
resilience are outlined, and a new approach to collective resilience that has been developed through recent research on crowd psychology is described. The article concludes with some implications for managing disasters and practice, including the suggestion that crowds be treated as part of the solution rather than part of the problem in mass emergencies and disasters.

Tracking disaster aid after a major event is tricky. But it is something that governments have to do immediately. Transparency and accountability during emergency response, recovery and reconstruction post disaster is a must. The public, media, and the affected communities would always ask "where did all the money go?" For Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines,  it is the classic debate of perceived corruption or the lack of an effective post-disaster communications strategy in the recovery and reconstruction efforts? 5 years after Yolanda, people are still asking where did all the foreign aid go? In the minds of many, they believe that government officials pocketed the billions intended for Yolanda victims. But what is perceived as corruption in the Yolanda rehabilitation and recovery efforts is to a large extent a lack of an effective communications strategy. We all know that a successful post-disaster rehabilitation and recovery is beyond the control of one person. But an effective communications strategy would have helped the government manage expectations and shape people’s perception about the Typhoon Yolanda rehabilitation and recovery efforts.  For a mega-disaster like Yolanda, everyone is asking how much did donors and aid agencies give, where did the money go and what projects were funded and where are they implemented.

Este es un boletín que editamos con motivo del impacto del huracán Patricia en las costas de Colima y Jalisco los días 23 y 24 de octubre del año 2015, como parte de los trabajos colegiados entre integrantes de la REDESClim-Conacyt: http://www.redesclim.org.mx/

Critical incidents often result in amplified social solidarity among the members of a traumatized community. Some argue this solidarity accelerates recovery and supportive social environments decrease the likelihood of PTSD and other health problems after traumatic events. However, little research investigates if social solidarity influences wellbeing independent from the social support that accompanies heightened solidarity. That is, does feeling attached to a group protect one from negative events even if social support ...

Ante la magnitud del sismi del 21 de enero de 2003, Colima y su gente no puede dejar de testimoniar, desde diversos ángulos, cómo se vivió una experiencia de tal magnitud. Es oportuno y necesario recopilar la mirada y el pensamiento de diversos sectores de la sociedad, quienes puenden contar para sus contemporáneos, o para la posteridad, cómo asume un pueblo una situación extraordinaria.

Dear Colleague,

It is my great pleasure to invite you to participate in the 6th ICT Forum that will be held in October 14-16, 2014 in Nis, Serbia.
Additional information on the 6th ICT Forum is enclosed and can be found at the following website www.ictforum.rpkni.rs.

Marko Stosic

In the present lives in the postcolony are beset by relentless disasters,
generating great suffering and loss. How should an international
lawyer conduct herself in response? Resisting the urge to construct
these times as entirely unprecedented, this article attempts a
response by drawing out the conduct of two ancestral Third World
international lawyers responding to disasters in their own time. It
reveals how disasters never simply occur but are actively produced
by particular modes of conduct deployed by international lawyers.
From their conduct we learn how to attend to the tasks of justice and
responsibility in the aftermath of disaster by being responsive to the
suffering and by recognising the disastrous effects of our action. We
also learn how attending to the tasks of inheritance is vital for this.

Singapore in the 1950s was a deeply divided society. Struggling to recover from the hardships of the Second World War and fighting an internal battle that the British government termed an 'emergency', it was a time of hardship, tension, and anxiety. In the midst of this crisis, Singapore's inhabitants continued to manage the natural elements of their climate and environment, especially the dangerous combination of heavy monsoonal rains, low-lying marshland, and tidal flooding. This article examines the circumstances surrounding a particularly severe episode of flooding that occurred in December 1954. It explores how the flood's impact was exacerbated by human exigencies, especially recent government resettlement plans and infrastructural weaknesses. In line with the themes of this special issue, it explores the notion of 'justice' during a disaster. In this case, justice was intimately related to political agency, social vulnerability and resilience. Viewed in this way, the flood story can be used as a lens into the wider socio-political contexts of the time.

Adaptation is a crucial practice, both materially and epistemologically. But especially in regards to the latter, the impact of adaptation processes has not yet received the attention it demands. Knowledge production is a central concern of the so-called Anthropocene, because it lays out the frames in which adaptation to climate change and other global environmental crises are realized (or not). By comparing adaptations of climate change in Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004) and Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) as well as Solar by Ian McEwan (2010) and Freedom by Johnathan Franzen (2010), this paper aims at demonstrating how narrative adaptation and material adaptation to climate change are intertwined. In fact, these contrasting narratives share a conviction that the gap between the sciences and the humanities and the ensuing failure of communication (within and outside of academia) plays a crucial part in the failure to understand and adapt to the changing conditions on planet Earth. By regarding adaptation as a negotiating practice that is part of knowledge production and representation, this paper aims to revisit expectations and bias on both sides and to point out that neither science nor fiction is entirely determined by scientists or literary scholars. It will show how analyzing the adaptation of climate change can give insight into the cultural framework necessary for an adaptation to global disaster.

Traditional PD research offers a range of methods for participant engagement. Yet little is shared of the microdynamics of participation at its most intense, when the designer as facilitator is challenged by a range of social contingencies. Engaging people in change can be a messy process, especially when emotions run high. This paper explores two situations where communities were asked

"Author(s): Manuel Suter

Series: Risk and Resilience Reports

Publisher(s): Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich

Date: 2012/09/25

Publication Year: 2012

This focal report analyzes the relationship between resilience and risk management, which is the predominant methodology of protection policies. It is argued that there are three main conceptualizations of the risk-resilience relationship in the theoretical literature and in CIP-policy documents: resilience as the goal of risk management, resilience as part of risk management and resilience as alternative to risk management. The report describes the historical and theoretical background of each of these three conceptualizations, provides empirical examples, and outlines the practical relevance of the different perspectives. A final part describes how the Swiss Basic Strategy to CIP describes resilience and gives recommendations which of the risk-resilience conceptualizations fit best to the Swiss approach to CIP."

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

While frequent earthquakes, tsunami and fires have been the subject of a long history of disaster literature in Japan, Kimura Saeko argues that the nature of the 3-11 nuclear disaster gave rise to a genre of literature focusing on the voices of the dead. She supports this argument by reading several key works on the subject of 3-11 through a lens of Derrida's theory of hauntology. In this paper, I further focus the argument on the relationship between the voices of the dead and their bodies, examining the way in which Itō Seikō's Sōzō Radio presents a theory of reality in which human beings are inhabited by two distinct souls: a spiritual soul and a corporeal one. By doing so, Itō attempts to tackle the mountainous task of how to cope with a reality suddenly forced to be shared with innumerable ghosts. Moreover, I argue that two distinct features of the 3-11 disaster-the combination of living in an age of mass communication and the physical limitations of efforts to recover from radiation exposure-compel us to cope not only with the loss of human life, but also with the overwhelming presence of former humans, reduced to their composite parts under the eyes of the world. In giving a voice to bodies, who still share the shape of what we lost, Itō suggests that the nature of human psychology requires living alongside ghosts, whose presence may be no more than imaginary, but no less real than the memory of the living who were.

Book chapter on disaster & disability, inclusive disaster preparedness.

Disaster risk management (DRM) involves risk mitigation, prepared- ness to disasters and disaster management. It is “a way of thinking and acting around risk” which goes beyond infrastructure-based solutions and focuses on society, emphasizing the vitality of improving people’s capacity to cope with disasters and building social resilience, in order to minimize the potential effects of disaster risks. These goals, however, cannot be reached through “generic” DRM frameworks designed for the “average citizens” without significant health issues, who are supposed to possess adequate resources and a sufficient literacy level to access information. Inclusiveness, therefore, becomes necessary to bring under the same protection umbrella the ones excluded by the “one size fits all” attitude. In this sense, Disability Inclusive Disaster Risk Management (DiDRM) aims to compensate the lack of adapted strategies for individuals with disabilities.

The modern South Korean cultural imaginary has been marked by a curious lack of large-scale, naturally occurring, apocalyptic disaster narratives. This absence becomes significant when mapped against narratives of manmade disasters that are typically juxtaposed with depictions of solid and unchanging physical land, within which the hyangto (home soil) frequently emerges as a comforting signifier for the cultural continuity of the Korean nation in the face of social and political disasters. This article will discuss the significance of this representational insistence of safe land, and why the physical soil of the Korean peninsula itself takes such a central stage in narratives of national (but very rarely natural) disasters. To foreground a reading of the only Korean natural disaster blockbuster film to date, Haeundae (Tidal Wave, 2009), as an example of how disaster narratives have been integrated into wider political discourses of communal or even national identity, this article will highlight a clear resistance to the mere possibility of nature turning on human beings in the modern Korean cinematic imaginary. This approach, in turn, reveals a strong symbolic link between the grand narrative of the Korean people and culture as being inextricably entwined with the unchanging nature of the physical soil itself.

That talk is never disinterested complicates the relationship between the environment and the claims people make about it. Talk about place, and one's self in it, is particularly complex when the environment poses risk or is otherwise problematized. This study, a secondary analysis of interview data, seeks to extend discursive work on place-identity by examining the ways in which 14 residents of a small English village talk about themselves and their locale. The locale accommodates an active quarry, and many residents had lodged complaints to the quarry about dust, noise and vibrations from blasting. Attention to the interactional context of the interviews illustrates the ways in which (simply) interviewing people about their locale can threaten self- and place-identity. When asked about life in the village, interviewees oriented to two main dilemmas in protecting self- and place-identity: (1) how to justify continued residence in a challenging environment and (2) how to complain about the locale whilst maintaining positive place-identity. Discursive responses to these dilemmas drew upon typical identity processes, such as self- and place distinctiveness and the formulation of out-groups, as well as upon constructions of localized power-sharing and morally obligated tolerance of risk. We suggest that research on problematical places, and of environmental risk, needs to be sensitized to how it may constitute a threat to self- and place-identity, and how this may mediate formulations self and place, as well as of environmental risk.

"This study addresses the life of indigenous people in a village community on Sumba, an island of Eastern Indonesia that is particularly prone to natural disasters. Over the past two decades the people of Sumba have experienced problems such as locust pest/Locusta Migratoria Manilensis  (1998-2005),  Tai  Kabala  grass/Chromolina odorata (2006), whirlwind (2007), earthquakes (2007 and 2009), famine (2007), and barrenness or drought (every year). Wunga  village,  deemed  to  be  the  place  the  Sumbanese  ancestors  arrived  at  when  they  first  came  to Sumba, was also affected by the disasters mentioned, and was hit especially hard.

By using an ethno-ecology approach, the  present  research  found  that Wunga  people, of whom 85,4% follow Marapu  (the  local  religion  in Sumba), have created their own meanings (based on emic view) for natural disasters that differ from the views of scholars and from the Indonesian government’s policy as the global perspective. This difference stems from the creation by the Wunga people of their own taxonomies and perspectives on their ecology.

This paper aims to answer questions about how the Marapu followers in Wunga village view their own vulnerable ecology, what meanings and behavioral responses the Marapu followers in Wunga village ascribe to natural disasters, and the factors that contribute to the formation of these meanings and behaviors. We will see how local identity among Marapu followers gives rise to a discourse of natural disaster that is distinct from constructions of the globalization. In addition, issues of politics of environment and market power will also be used as a framework of interpretation to see the problem of poverty in Wunga as a risk factor of disasters that could happen in the future.

Keywords: Marapu, ethnoecology, natural disaster, meaning, and response.
"

This paper explores the production process behind charity appeals in the context of developing Philippines. INGO appeals have traditionally been studied through textual analyses that expose their use of shock effect techniques and neo-colonial narratives that fail to bridge the “moral distance” between Western donors and “distant sufferers” (Chouliaraki, 2013; Vestergaard, 2009). Here, I develop an ethnographic approach to investigate the interactions between producers and the poor people who are subjects of appeals. I pay attention to producers’ articulations of “good work” and strategies of compliance and resistance as regards local media conventions of representing suffering within a culture of disaster and everyday suffering.

หนังสือเล่มนี้ได้เรียบเรียงโดยผู้ที่ประสบการณ์ตรงได้คลี่ให้เห็นความดีงามของสังคมไทย สังคมโลก ความสำเร็จ ความบกพร่อง ความผิดพลาดทั้งในอดีตและปัจจุบัน ได้เผยให้เห็นธาตุแท้ของสังคมไทย ทั้งในยามปกติ และยาววิกฤติ โดยเผยให้เห็นสิ่งที่คิดว่าไม่น่าจะมีอดีตที่ซุกซ่อนไว้ อันก่อให้เกิดการปฏิรูปเกือบจะทุกด้านและเป็นการปฏิรูปจากฐานรากจากล่างขึ้นบน

Published on the fifth anniversary of the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima meltdown, this book explores the ways that many of Japan's most important poets have written about and represented the disasters in their work.  This book contains a study of the themes, functions, and issues in that literature as well as copious translations of the original poetry. 

"In a time that for many of us in Tokyo and beyond feels far removed from the events of March 11, 2011, when we are not sure how to retain and respect those moments and their aftermath, this collection does exactly that. Jeffrey Angles' smart, useful introduction and the poems in this collection help us find a language of grace, dignity and poignancy, not only to look back but also to look forward." --David H. Slater

Phronetic organizational research is an approach to the study of management and organizations focusing on ethics and power. It is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, usually as ‘prudence’. Phronesis is the ability to think and act in relation to values, to deliberate about ‘things that are good or bad for humans’ in the words of Aristotle (1976:1140a24–b12). Phronetic organizational research effectively provides answers to the following four value-rational questions, for specific problematics in management and organization studies: 1. Where are we going with this specific management problematic? 2. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? 3. Is this development desirable? 4. What, if anything, should we do about it?