GI420- Week EIGHT Lecture_Disaster-2023

Disaster

The Politics of

GI420 Week EIGHT Lecture with Dr Nazanin Shahrokni

AGENDA

Announcements

Facts & Figures

Disaster studies

Analytical Framework for disaster studies

Gendering Disaster

01

Announcements

> Important dates and deadlines

> Formative Feedback

> Course Evaluations

> Lulu?

Speech: Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados at the Opening of the #COP26 World Leaders Summit

Did you follow the news about Barbados a couple of years ago? "Barbados parts away with the Queen and becomes world's newest republic."

THIS!! LISTEN TO HER!!

02

Facts & Figures

Disasters as events in which societies “incur physical damages and losses and/or disruption of their routine functioning. (Kreps 1989: 32)

In the period 2000 to 2019, there were 7,348 major recorded disaster events claiming 1.23 million lives.

We are willfully destructive. That is the only conclusion one can come to when reviewing disaster events over the last twenty years.

Mami Mizutori, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, 12 Oct 2020

Climate refugees?

03

Disaster Studies

functionalists

critical sociologists

vs

think about how disruptions like crises and disasters shatter dominant worldviews, uncover oppressive social relationships, and propose directions for future action

focus on the ways in which communities respond, reorganize, and resume their services & restore order and "normalcy."

04

Analytical framework for Disaster Studies

Wreak-Construction

Engin Atasay & Garrett Delavan (2012) "Monumentalizing disaster and wreak-construction: a case study of Haiti to rethink the privatization of public education," Journal of Education Policy 27(4): 529-553.

Question 03

Question 02

Question 01

Who benefits from moments of solidarity induced by crisis situations?

What is the purpose of restoring normalcy after a disaster if restoring normalcy means the re-institutionalization of marginality?

Which kinds of intervention are effective and/or ethical, and which are not?

Disaster Capitalism

POST-DISASTER RECONSTRUCTION

DISASTER RECOVERY

DISASTER CREATION

DISASTER PRODUCTION

Capitalism actively producing disasters

Capitalism fostering the conditions that lead to disasters

When is life grievable?

Pause for a second: The September 11 Victim Compensation Fund’s payments to families, Didier Fassin notes, depended on estimates of what their loved ones would have earned in the future, among other factors, so that poorer families received dramatically less money than rich ones.

DISASTER CAPITALISM

Neo-Liberalists require situations of Shock to push through their policies of privatisation, deregulation and cut backs to public spending because the majority of people would not accept such policies because they mean a transfer of wealth and power to corporate elites.

Making Money from Misery? Disaster Capitalism from the Migrant Crisis to Afghanistan and Haiti

05

Gendering Disasters

The gender gap in disaster risk management

Disaster Masculinity

Luft, R.E. (2016). "Racialized Disaster Patriarchy: An Intersectional Model for Understanding Disaster Ten Years after Hurricane Katrina." Feminist Formations 28(2): 1-26.

Racialized Disaster PatriarchyTriangulate gender, race & class

Disaster Capitalism

Race

Class

Gender

Racialized Disaster Patriarchy

shapes

DISASTER

shapes, produces & benefits from

Disaster patriarchy as a model reveals not the radically new, but rather the way in which racialized patriarchy has been the underlying logic all along. Disaster simply unleashes, concentrates, and justifies its more prominent resurgence.

In solidarity

Stay Safe!