Risk & Disaster TIG

Jennifer Trivedi
Mei Johnson
Noémie Gonzalez Bautista

Congratulations to Elizabeth Marino and A.J. Faas whose work “Is Vulnerability an Outdated Concept? After Subjects & Spaces" was AnthroSource’s most downloaded piece from Annals of Anthropological Practice in 2020! 

Congratulations too to the members of CADAN, the Culture and Disaster Action Network, including several R & D TIG members, who last year – as an NSF-funded Working Group - were awarded a grant for “Cumulative Effects: {Prior Disaster} + COVID-19” and are making this Research Protocol and Question Bank a free open access resource, inviting other researchers to use the tool and to share their findings. The Working Group Leads are Katherine E. Browne and Caela O’Connell and the Working Group Members are Alexa Dietrich, A.J. Faas, Alessandra Jerolleman, Adam Koons, Julie Maldonado, Keely Maxwell, Laura Olson, Namrita Singh, and Laura S. Meitzner Yoder. 

R & D TIG members and many others have also been working on the wide range of critical issues related to COVID-19 and publishing related work, including, but certainly not limited to “Compounded disasters: Puerto Rico confronts COVID‐19 under US colonialism” by Adriana María Garriga‐López; “Communication missteps during COVID‐19 hurt those already most at risk” by Aaron Clark-Ginsberg and Elizabeth L. Petrun Sayers; and “Bringing Indigenous and Earth Sciences, Knowledges, and Practices Together to Understand and Respond to COVID-19” by Lesley Iaukea, Heather Lazrus, Julie Maldonado, Paulette Blanchard, Theresa Dardar, John Doyle, Fred Eningowuk, Dennis Longknife, Melonee Montano, Michelle Montgomery, Jasmine Neosh, Margarita Nogueras-Vidal, James Rattling Leaf, Sr., and M. Kalani Souza.

Many of our members and people presenting on TIG-sponsored panels later this spring took part in the COVID-19-related special issues of Practicing Anthropology 42(4) and Human Organizations 79(4) put out in 2020, including in articles like “COVID-19 and All the Things That Kill Us: Research Ethics in the Time of Pandemic” by Elizabeth Marino, Joyce Rivera-Gonzalez, Mara Benadusi, Alexa Dietrich, Mo Hamza, Alessandra Jerolleman, and Adam Koons; “’I Told You the Invisible Can Kill You’: Engaging Anthropology as a Response in the COVID-19 Outbreak in Italy” by Selenia Marabello and Maria Luisa Parisi; “Viral Encounters: Xenophobia, Solidarity, and Place-based Lessons from Chinese Migrants in Italy” by Elizabeth L. Krause and Massimo Bressan; “Food Supply Chains, Family Farming, and Food Policies under the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Brazilian City” by Antonio de la Peña García; Silvia A. Zimmermann; Ana Alice Eleuterio; and “Entangled Roots and Otherwise Possibilities: An Anthropology of Disasters COVID-19 Research Agenda” by A.J. Faas, Roberto Barrios, Virginia García-Acosta, Adriana Garriga-López, Seven Mattes, and Jennifer Trivedi. 

Some of this work supported the panels that will be happening at the upcoming virtual 2021 SfAA Annual Meeting where the Risk & Disaster TIG is sponsoring a variety of panels. 

These include pre-recorded (on demand) events like “COVID-19 and the Community: Impacts, Perceptions, and Adaptations” (Parts I and II), “Dealing with Compound Disasters: Response, Recovery, and Sensemaking,” “Narratives of Displacement: Identity, Sense of Place, and Movement” and “When Different Worlds Meet: Interactions and Outcomes in Disaster Contexts.” 

We also are sponsoring a range of live/simulcast events. These include some events that are jointly offered or co-hosted, such as “Evaluating Responses to Natural Disasters in the Caribbean: Methods and Results” (Parts I and II) with the Fisheries & Coastal Communities TIG and “Sharing Ideas & Joining Forces: Connections, Intersections, and Collaborations among Extraction & Environment, Risk & Disaster, and PESO” with the ExtrACTION & Environment TIG and the Political Ecology Society (PESO). 

Other live/simulcast events are sponsored solely by the R & D TIG, including some built on previous COVID-19 publications like “Entangled Roots and Otherwise Possibilities: The Anthropology of the COVID-19 Pandemic” (Parts I and II), as well as a range of other panels and round tables including “Calculating Futures: The Afterlives of Environmental and Health Monitoring;” “Engaging Anthropologists in the National Climate Assessment: Opportunities and Lessons Learned;” “Marginalized, Forgotten, and Resilient: Discounted Communities and Disaster Recovery;” “Pandemic, Hurricanes, and Heritage: Southeast Resilience Roundtable;” and “Prospects for Improving Food Security: A Decade View on the Interactions of Covid 19 Pandemic and Climate Change by the Task Force on World Food Problems (TFWFP).” There will also be another double panel, “Sense and Nonsense: Bogus Categories and Saying What We Mean in Disaster Research” (Parts I and II) and the J. Anthony Paredes Memorial Plenary Modeling the Spread of COVID-19 on the Navajo Reservation. 

We will also be holding a live/simulcast open discussion on “The Future of the Risk and Disaster TIG: Fighting White Supremacy and Racism to Build an Inclusive Community.” We welcome everyone to join us for the open discussion on fighting white supremacy and racism and working on building an inclusive community. And, of course, we hope you’ll join us for as many of these presentations as you’re able to, as well as our regular Risk & Disaster TIG Business Meeting where all are welcome.

In just over the last year a number of books have also been published by authors and editors associated with the R & D TIG or of potential interest to our members, including the second edition of Susanna M. Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith’s edited volume The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective, Susanna M. Hoffman and Roberto E. Barrios’s edited volume Disaster Upon Disaster: Exploring the Gaps Between Knowledge, Policy and Practice, Virginia García-Acosta’s edited volume The Anthropology of Disasters in Latin America, Mark Schuller’s Humanity’s Last Stand: Confronting Global Catastrophe, and Jennifer Trivedi’s Mississippi After Katrina: Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction on the Gulf Coast.

Other readings of interest to R & D TIG members out in the last year include pieces like Muhammad Abdur Rahaman and Mohammad Mahbubur Rahman’s chapter on “Climate Justice and Food Security: Experience from Climate Finance in Bangladesh” in Environmental Policy: An Economic Perspective; Adriana Maí Garriga‐López’s article “Debt, Crisis, and Resurgence in Puerto Rico;” and Jo Rose and Ksenia Chmutina’s “Developing disaster risk reduction skills among informal construction workers in Nepal.” 

You can also always learn more about where you can follow the R&D TIG for news about the TIG, our members, and new publications and to join in the conversation at https://linktr.ee/RiskDisasterTIG. Please don’t hesitate to share that link more broadly if you know others who may be interested. And please join our listserv or social media and feel free to reach out to us to share work or questions you have and to join in on the conversation!