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Email exchanges between Roberto and Vivian

vychoi
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Roberto:

Perhaps this piece by Paul Farmer et al. on the compounding of the cholera epidemic and earthquake in Haiti gives us some food for thought? Thinking about transnational STS and critical disaster studies, it may be worthwhile to discuss how COVID is compounded in places that are still recovering from or experiencing other kinds of disasters. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3104956/Vivian: I have been interested (not surprisingly) of how the pandemic has been framed, in particular, as a war, an "invisible enemy," something that requires some external or bio-technical solution or shifts blame -- in disasters, of course, we know this happens (e.g., framing disasters as merely "natural" ).  Celia Lowe's article on the pandemic that never quite was (H5N1) I like -- asking questions like for whom is biosecurity? And illustrating how geopolitics plays in anticipatory pandemic responses.  I have attached that piece.  There is another piece that I have been interested in: The State, Sewers, and Security: How Does the Egyptian State Reframe Environmental Disasters as Terrorist Threats? by Mohameed Rafi Arafin, in AAAG.https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1497474. The other aspect I have been trying to think through, which maybe already came up in the anti-blackness/rebellious mourning call: I have been thinking a lot about how George Floyd tested positive for COVID-19, how this is a compounded disaster: antiblackness, institutionalized racism, and the pandemic. I don't think that anyone would argue against the notion that the pandemic is a disaster, but what about it is disaster?  I like thinking about disaster as capaciously as possible.  I have started reading Christina Sharpe's "In the Wake," in which she talks about slavery, black subjection, colonialism, terror as disaster. Perhaps this would be a timely piece of work to add to disaster literature? The first chapter is available on Duke UP's website: https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6294-4_601.pdfRoberto:I think another piece that might go well with this group of readings is Lakoff and Collier's "Vital Systems Security." I am pasting a link to it below. Andrew Lakoff also did a talk for the Italian Society for Applied Anthropology on the pandemic recently. The talk is up on Youtube. I am also pasting a link to it.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273911201_Vital_Systems_Security_Reflexive_Biopolitics_and_the_Government_of_Emergencyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhkublz7vJw&fbclid=IwAR2k9x_oNu9YR_YDuI98oSzn5w7PoTjPa0JMI7MBkuwKxYJarSCXD7MMvewAlso, I have recently co-authored a piece that will come out in Human Organization about disaster anthropology and COVID 19. The contributors to that article included Virginia Garcia Acosta and AJ Faas. Although the piece is not available for circulation yet, here are some questions that came up during the drafting of the article: 
  1. Disaster anthropologists have long defined disasters as diachronic processes that enhance the socially disruptive and materially destructive capacities of geophysical phenomena, technological "accidents," and epidemics. One question to ask however, is whether we must give special consideration to the way viruses manifest agency in comparison to say hurricanes, earthquakes, or toxins or radioactivity released during technological accidents. Do we draw analytical blindsides by reducing pandemics to simply another kind of disaster? What special methodological and theoretical considerations must we keep in mind when examining COVID 19 from a disaster anthropology perspective? 
  2. Following up on the question above. In many instances, governmental, non-governmental, and inter-governmental organizations engage in a division of labor that separates responsibility for disaster management from pandemic management while, in other instances, an organization may be charged with managing both. When dealing with COVID as a transnational phenomenon, what agencies are involved in its mitigation and how do their legal and policy jurisdictions factor in to their ability to handle the pandemic? 

Roberto:

Also, just thinking about the general historicity of the branch of disaster anthropology I was trained in (which we could say is the Susanna Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith branch of the field that is heavily invested in political ecology and vulnerability theory), a lot of folks see O'Keefe et al's 1976 article as foundational. What is interesting here is that these critical geographers used a comparative approach at the level of the nation as the ground for making their core argument. So there may be some room for discussion there in terms of the Disasters STS group wanting to transcend national level data. Here's the citation for that article: O’Keefe P,Westgate K,Wisner B. 1976. Taking the naturalness out of natural disasters. Nature 260:566–67Oliver-Smith, who is credited with bringing political ecology and disaster anthropology into conversation also credits the work of a Latin American and British network of geographers, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists called La Red with creating the formulation of Marxist analysis that became foundational of the vulnerability shcool of thought. Andrew Maskrey and a group of Latin American researchers including Virginia Garcia Acosta, Gustavo Wilches Chaux, and Jesus Manuel Macias, among others collaborated on this volume, which precedes Oliver-Smith's and Hoffman's The Angry Earth and deserves a good bit of the credit for what became the American flavor of political ecology disaster studies in the US: Maskrey A, ed. 1993. Los Desastres No Son Naturales. Bogot´a, Colomb.: La RED, Intermed. Technol. Dev.
GroupFinally, getting back to Lakoff and Collier, I think Ulrich Beck's Risk Society is particularly relevant here. Beck's concern with the ways toxicity and radioactivity moved across national borders (a transnational risk) and the kinds of social movements he hoped would emerge to counteract them may be worth discussing in the COVID 19 context.

Vivian:

VSS and Reflexive Biopolitics goes well with Lowe's piece, because she makes the very good point that the infrastructures that Lakoff/Collier discuss that are at the core of VSS/biopolitical governance are quite different across contexts (and as she goes on to show, in Indonesia).  Beck is interesting, certainly, and is part of a general group of sociologists (including Giddens, etc) that discuss risk/globalization.   

Thank you, Roberto, for the history/roots of Oliver-Smith/Hoffman's work. As an aside, there is always one part of Oliver-Smith's "Theorizing Disasters" from Catastrophe and Culture that I never really understood, which is why he excluded terrorist attacks and war from his pretty inclusive list of disasters. There is no discussion or footnote or anything that I could find!  And, obviously, Kim, your work on Bhopal as a transnational disaster is so helpful too.Roberto: As for your question about why war and terrorist attacks were not included in the OS branch of disaster anthropology, I've heard or read a few comments on the matter, but I can't quite recall where at the moment. The justification runs along the line that there are different "root causes" and different institutions as well as different problematics involved. For example, political conflict can result in refugee movements, which involve a different collections of agencies as well as international accords like UNHCR. Granted, we can make the case that disasters also drive transnational migration, but, if I am not mistaken, the UN Convention does not recognize them as refugees. Maybe that's changed since my refugee studies days back in the 90s. Also, disasters and pandemics are the result of human practices that enhance the socially destructive and materially destructive capacities of geophysical phenomena and viruses, while political conflict and war are seen as the result of political intentionalities. Now this is me badly paraphrasing the justifications which, I agree, may not be completely watertight. Some anthroplogists have explored the relationships between disaster and political conflict, but usually the studies focus on how disasters push a particular historical political ecology over the edge into all out conflict. Sahlins' Stone Age Economics, for example, makes a connection between cyclones, famine, and eventual political turmoil, but the latter is seen as an effect and not as an ontological coeval. Same goes for the Guatemalan Civil War after the 1976 earthquake and there's quite a few other disaster ethnogrpahies that look at social change in the aftermath of a disaster. So there is literature that connects the two but, in some brands of disaster anthropology, war and disaster remain ontologically different. I guess it would make for a good conversation as to the blindsides such a differentiation creates and whether there are useful reasons to maintain it. Something that comes to mind in this case is Mitchell's Can the Mosquito Speak, where he looks at malaria epidemics and WWII in Egypt as intimately entangled, and we could certainly say the same about war and disaster in many cases. Also, a little footnote that may not be relevant: When Oliver-Smith was at the University of Florida, he worked closely with Art Hansen, who specialized in refugee movements. Perhaps some of this differentiation is the result of an academic division of labor from those days? That might be pushing it. I do think in general, a lot of the disaster anthropologists from this branch of anthropology would defend the differentiation they make on the grounds I listed above which, again, may have faults worth discussing. Finally, it is worth noting that many disaster anthropologists do recognize the history of militarized disaster response in the US, which goes back to Collier and Lakoff's Vital Systems Security, but it seems they separate terrorism, war, and disasters because of their different "root causes."PS - I guess the issue of war, terrorist attacks, and disasters being ontologically coeval gets to the heart of what kind of anthropology we want to do. One of the issues I have with political ecology and vulenrability theory is that they remain soemwhat unreflexive about their own modern epistemological vantagepoint. So, to a great extent, these kinds of disaster anthropology begin with certain predetermined ontologies as an analytical point of departure. I guess we could think of other kinds of anthropology where ontologies are not analytically predetermined, but they constitution is explored over the course of the ethnogrpahy like Mol does in Multiple Ontologies. Someone who comes to mind is Mara Benadusi, who has an article in Economic Anthropology about oil refinery development as disaster. The case here is that, while petrochemical development may not fit certain narrowly defined ideas about what a disaster is, what matters is that her interlocutors mobilize disaster discourse to speak about its toxic effects.Vivian:Yes, I like thinking of the disaster as being multiple (pace Mol).  In my own research in Sri Lanka, the government has, with the UN funding, developed their Disaster Management Act in 2005, following the Indian Ocean tsunami.  Specifically, the Act and much of the work undertaken by the post-tsunami established Disaster Management Centre focused on mainstreaming of "Disaster Risk Reduction" (preparedness rather than response -- this is also the management orientation that Lakoff/Collier discuss in the context of the US).  In Sri Lanka, everything from tsunamis and earthquakes, to fires and civil strife and terrorist attackes are all consider "risks" under the purview of the Disaster Management Centre.  The former Minister of Disaster Management would regularly refer to Sri Lanka's decades-long civil war as a "human-made" disaster, when speaking about mainstreaming Disaster Risk Reduction in the country. In light of my own experience, I always struggled with OS's exclusion of terrorist attacks and war!

Morgan: What insights from critical theorizing about place can inform current efforts to understand and respond to the COVID-19

alli.morgan

I've found myself returning to thinking about/around/within interstitial spaces of care, particularly within hospital settings, interested in how viral activity unsettles the ideas we have around space and boundaries, both biological and infrastructural. In COVID-19 pathology and response, the inbetween, the interstitial, become sites challenge and possibility. With COVID-19, we see an acknowledgment of once forgotten spaces quite obviously, with hospital atria and hallways being reconfigured into patient care spaces, makeshift morgues established in refrigerated trucks, and hospitals spilling out into neighboring streets and parks. More than ever, we see how hospitals are simultaneously bounded and unbounded--the most stable and unstable sites for care. Along this line of thought, what might thinking through hospitals as heterotopia of crisis and deviation afford?

Foucault outlines six principles for heterotopic spaces

The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible

Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications.

Morgan: Where are you situated as COVID-19 plays out? What backstories shape your engagement with COVID-19? How can you be conta

alli.morgan

I'm currently based in Troy, NY where I recently completed a PhD in Science and Technology Studies.  I'll soon be living in NYC to attend medical school. I can be reached at amorgan14[at]gmail[dot]com

I've long been interested in the disaster of routine medical care in the U.S. healthcare system. As far as COVID-19 is concerned, I'm particularly interested in how the long-term health impacts of intensive care are conceptualized and communicated (including Post Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS)) and the tensions between acute and chronic illness, broadly. 

How is the aftermath of COVID-19 crisis being imagined in different settings? How is this shaping beliefs, practices, and policies?

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joerene.aviles

The author of the article seemed to conduct their research from NPR reporters in Haiti, interviews with various organizations (U.N, Center for Economic Policy and Research, and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti), and other reports (one from the  U.S. Government Accountability Office was referenced). 

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joerene.aviles

The main argument is that previous disasters involving burning buildings in US history and the subsequent investigations affected emergency response, policy making, and disaster investigation today. These past events can be applied to the 9/11 terrorist attack and investigation of the buildings afterward.

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joerene.aviles

1. “Chronic disaster syndrome” thus refers in this analysis to the cluster of trauma-and posttrauma-related phenomena that are at once individual, social, and political and that are associated with disaster as simultaneously causative and experiential of a chronic condition of distress in relation to displacement.

2. Most efforts to rebuild health care facilities focused on emergency care, routine care, and surgical services rather than psychiatry.

3. For many people, the idea that they had to stay in a state of heightened response to the pending “crisis”—a state they had already been in for over two years—produced huge anxiety and exhaustion.

4. Instead, the notion that New Orleanians themselves were a threat to public or national security circulated and became a rationale for the efforts the government did take to effect change in New Orleans. This change, in effect, targeted the poor. The poor, it seems, were to be evicted from New Orleans as a way to “clean up” the city and help it recover once and for all.

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joerene.aviles

1. Arguably, the new Ukrainian accounting of the Cherobyl unknown was part and parcel of the government's strategies for "knowledge-based" governance and social mobilization. In 1991 and in its first set of laws, the new parliament denounced the Soviet management of Chemobyl as "an act of genocide."

2. On the one hand, the Ukrainian government rejected Western neoliberal prescriptions to downsize its social welfare domain; on the other hand, it presented itself as informed by the principles of a moder risk society. On the one hand, these Chernobyl laws allowed for unprecedented civic organizing; on the other hand, they became distinct venues of corruption through which informal practices of providing or selling access to state privileges and protections (blat) expanded.

3. Government-operated radiation research clinics and non- governmental organizations mediate an informal economy of illness and claims to a "biological citizenship"-a demand for, but limited access to, a form of social welfare based on medical, scientific, and legal criteria that recognize injury and compensate for it.

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joerene.aviles
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Teach 3.11 was developed to serve students and general public. It allows the public to have more access to different books, teaching material, and research regarding disasters. The website was built in response to the Fukushima disaster of 2011, in order to provide "an educational space for understanding the history, memory, and context of social disasters" (Teach 3.11). The editorial team has members from different countries, reflecting the international collaboration that natural and nuclear disasters require. With it's availability in six different languages, public contribution and comments enabled on articles gives a global platform for discussion and sharing. They are currently accepting papers for their "Terms of Disaster" collection.