Updates from the Risk & Disaster TIG

Jennifer Trivedi
Anuszka Mosurska
Mark Schuller
 

The Risk and Disaster TIG had a range of panels and events full of engaged conversation in Cincinnati this past spring and is very much looking forward to even more discussions in Santa Fe next year - keep an eye out for our Call for Abstracts to join in a Risk & Disaster panel or event! 

This year we had 7 panels with 26 papers and 7 other events in-person in Cincinnati at the annual meetings, as well as another 7 on-demand unpaneled papers and 3 on-demand panels available on Whova. We were absolutely thrilled at the wide range of topics covered by these papers, panels, and other events. 

While we had a robust continuation of our ongoing discussions of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on many people around the world, we also engaged in a lot of discussion about other disasters and larger issues. There continues to be a lot of conversation around climate change in and of itself, as well as how it intersects with other hazards, risks, and disasters. There was also a lot of dialogue around issues related to social justice, colonialism, inequality, and inequity, including who was affected in different ways by disasters, the power structures that reinforced those impacts, and whose voices were heard in different settings of research and practice. Several events also deliberated different methods that had been or could be used in the field, ways to publish and share data, and approaches of how to engage with people in different contexts. Ongoing discussion swirled around terminology and its impact, as well as larger issues in the discipline like critical disaster studies, cross-disciplinary research agendas, and navigating communication inside and outside of anthropology. 

New books in the field continue to come out, including: those in the Berghahn Book series, Catastrophes in Context: A Series in Engaged Social Science on Disasters, edited by Roberto E. Barrios, Crystal Felima, and Mark Schuller which includes new titles like Making Things Happen: Community Participation and Disaster Reconstruction in Pakistan by Jane Murphy Thomas and The Power of the Story: Writing Disasters in Haiti and the Circum-Caribbean edited by Vincent Joos, Martin Munro, and John Ribó, as well as the forthcoming Designing Knowledge Economies for Disaster Resilience: Case Studies from the African Diaspora edited by Pamela Waldron-Moore; In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador by A.J. Faas with Rutgers University Press; Sensing Disaster: Local Knowledge and Vulnerability in Oceania by Matthew Lauer with the University of California Press; and The Power of Nature: Archaeology and Human-Environmental Dynamics edited by Monica L. Smith with the University Press of Colorado.

If you are interested in more of the work that our TIG is doing in the world, connect with us – you can visit our Linktree for more information. And if you are a member of the Risk and Disaster TIG, we would love to feature and highlight your work! Please email us at riskanddisastertig@gmail.com!