COVID-19 as Disaster
Photo essay curating insights from critical disaster studies for the transnational disaster STS COVID-19 project.
Photo essay curating insights from critical disaster studies for the transnational disaster STS COVID-19 project.
Digital collection supporting a Transnational Disaster STS COVID-19 Collaboration Call, Thursday, July 9, 2020.
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: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.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!Nearly half of Newark's school's are contaminated with dangerous levels of lead. Or so they were two years ago when this article was published. This relates to infrastructure because we are poisoning poor, primarily black and hispanic communities, whom already have low resilience. Because they live in empowerished neighborhouds, their children go to lower income schools, and when they drink the water provided there, they put themselves at risk of cancer, infertillity, and other results of lead poisoning. If Newark's infrastructure was more balanced between white and black communities, there would not be impoverished areas that have poisonous drinking water at schools, as the water standard in the schools would have been raised to that of higher income communities.
The incredible amount of awful potholes in Newark called for this report. This report lists all of the streets and the dates that they will be paved in Newark, and it is one fat list. Newark roads are awful. Bad roads=poor infrastructure= weak resilience. If there is a disaster, someone who lives in a poor area may hit a pothole and be completely stranded and die, as a result of the poor infrastructure of our roads in Newark. I once hit a pothole in Newark and the bang from my wheel hitting the edge of the hole was loud and drastic enough for me to worry about a flat tire. I didn't get a flat, fortunately, but my tire frame was bent.
This artical taliking about new jersey urban water quality. Now CSO finding a solution to that hazard. It allready taken substantial steps toward reducing or ending overflows. This “solids and floatables” control is an example of system optimization,This also has reduced the amount of trash getting dumped into waterways via CSO outfalls.
The article focuses on rebuilding more resilliently,
"At the forefront of this work is NJIT’s Center for Resilient Design, housed at the university’s College of Architecture and Design. Established immediately post-Sandy, the Center conducts research and serves as a clearinghouse for expertise, ready-to-build designs, case studies and best practices. The Center is accessed by state and local leaders, business owners and residents living in areas especially vulnerable to flooding and storms."
Air pollution is a huge issue nowadays, and it has a side effect on people's health as well. Air pollution divided into different type of pollution (Climate Change, Toxic Pollutants, Protecting the Stratospheric Ozone Layer, etc). Each one of this hase a negative effects on public health. First Climate Change, it is expected to lead to more intense hurricanes and storms, heavier and more frequent flooding, increased drought and that lead to death or injuries. Second Toxic Pollutants, it basically causes cancer, "EPA’s most recent national assessment of inhalation risks from air toxics12 estimated that the whole nation experiences lifetime cancer risks above ten in a million, and that almost 14 million people in more than 60 urban locations have lifetime cancer risks greater than 100 in a million." (EPA United States Environmental Protection Agency, para 41).
The article focuses on rebuilding more resilliently,
"At the forefront of this work is NJIT’s Center for Resilient Design, housed at the university’s College of Architecture and Design. Established immediately post-Sandy, the Center conducts research and serves as a clearinghouse for expertise, ready-to-build designs, case studies and best practices. The Center is accessed by state and local leaders, business owners and residents living in areas especially vulnerable to flooding and storms."
The main argument in this artical is children poverty in newark has increased by 19 percent in the last 15 years. In newark over 40% of chlidren live in poverty.