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Middle German Chemical Triangle

Chemiepark Leuna von Bad Dürrenberg aus gesehen, im Vordergrund die Saalebrücke der Bahnstrecke Leipzig Hbf-Weißenfels

This collection includes case study research and civic archiving about the Middle German Chemical Triangle (or chemical triangle). 

COVID-19 as Disaster

Photo essay curating insights from critical disaster studies for the transnational disaster STS COVID-19 project. 

COVID-19 as Disaster

COVID-19 as Disaster

Digital collection supporting a Transnational Disaster STS COVID-19 Collaboration Call, Thursday, July 9, 2020. 

Email exchanges between Roberto and Vivian

vychoi
Annotation of

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!

Michael Kilburn: Anthropocenic ideologies and living in truth

Michael Kilburn

Anthropocene psychologies (or psychopathologies) have some similarities to the decadence and denialism of late socialism in central and eastern Europe that is one of my research interests. As ecological disasters, particularly in the coal regions of northern Bohemia; the most polluted area of europe at the time) gave the lie to the Party line of progress and prosperity, a comforting veil of ideology allowed leaders and many citizens to go about their business "as if" there were no looming crisis. In his New Year's address after becoming the first post Communist president of Czechoslovakia, dissident playwright Vaclav Havel made this connection clear, describing the destroyed environment as an undeniable symptom of modern humanity's disconnection from the natural world and a "contaminated moral environment." As outlined in the work of historian Miroslav Vanek (see our article "Ecological Roots of a democracy movement") , the ecological crisis was deeply entwined with a political crisis that eventually led to the collapse of the Communist state in Czechoslovakia in 1989. Havel's critique was not just of Communist ideologies, but of ideologies of technologival civilization and modernity in general:

"What we call the consumer and industrial (or postindustrial) society, and Ortega y Gasset once understood as "the revolt of the masses," as well as the intellectual, moral, political, and social misery in the world today: all of this is perhaps merely an aspect of the deep crisis in which humanity, dragged helplessly along by the automatism of global technological civilization, finds itself. The post-totalitarian system is only one aspect-a particularly drastic aspect and thus all the more revealing of its real origins-of this general inability of modern humanity to be the master of its own situation. The automatism of the posttotalitarian system is merely an extreme version of the global automatism of technological civilization. The human failure that it mirrors is only one variant of Ihe general failure of modern humanity. This planetary challenge to the position of human beings in the world is, of course, also taking place in the Western world, the only difference being the social and political forms it takes- Heidegger refers expressly to a crisis of democracy. ... It may even be said Ihat the more room there is in the Western democracies (compared to our world) for the genuine aims of life, the better the crisis is hidden from people and the more deeply do they become immersed in it. It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-cousumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the posttotalitarian societies. But this static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy, and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex focuses of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information: all of it, so often analyzed and described, can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity's rediscovery of itself." (Power of the Powerless, 1978)

Michael Kilburn: The energy of slaves

Michael Kilburn

Thinking about the theme of this campus and after reviewing the material on the Whitney plantation, I was pondering the connections between the history of slavery in Louisiana and the industrial/technical implications and affects of the Anthropocene. I remembered a book by Andrew Nikiforuk called “The Energy of Slaves” (shout out to L Cohen fans)) which draws clear historical and technical parallels between the energy regimes of slavery and the petrochemical industry. Thought it might be interesting/relevant.

From the Greystonebooks publisher’s description:

“A radical analysis of our master-and-slave relationship to energy and a call for change.

Ancient civilizations routinely relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities. In the early nineteenth century, the slave trade became one of the most profitable enterprises on the planet, and slaveholders viewed religious critics as hostilely as oil companies now regard environmentalists. Yet when the abolition movement finally triumphed in the 1850s, it had an invisible ally: coal and oil. As the world's most portable and versatile workers, fossil fuels dramatically replenished slavery's ranks with combustion engines and other labour-saving tools. Since then, oil has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, gender, and even our concept of happiness. But as Andrew Nikiforuk argues in this provocative new book, we still behave like slaveholders in the way we use energy, and that urgently needs to change.

Many North Americans and Europeans today enjoy lifestyles as extravagant as those of Caribbean plantation owners. Like slaveholders, we feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion, and now that half of the world's oil has been burned, our energy slaves are becoming more expensive by the day. What we need, Nikiforuk argues, is a radical new emancipation movement.”

Also book review @: https://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-the-energy-of-slaves-oil-and-the-new-servitude/

Michael Kilburn: NOLA Anthropocenics

Michael Kilburn

If the Anthropocene epoch is characterized by a decadent, mutually destructive dance of human and physical geographies, then New Orleans is the perfect host city. Founded on the exploitation of both human and natural resources, built on the shifting sands of the delta, stripped of natural defenses, sitting below sea level with only earthen levees and ancient pumps keeping out the toxic waters of the Mississippi, Lake and Gulf, the city is a model of social and environmental injustice and unsustainability. The drunk staggering home past the trash and vomit on Bourbon street singing Jock-a-mo while the rats scurry, the levees seep and storm clouds gather in the Gulf is a good metaphor for the state of the planet and human civilization in the current epoch.

Yet, despite the intractable problems of decaying infrastructure, inequality, corruption and the constant threat of disaster, a stubborn spirit of grit, resilience, and even joy somehow endures. I first visited New Orleans in 2007. While the CBD and tourist quarters were open for business, heaps of steaming, mouldering debris still littered the lower 9th ward and outlying districts and half the population remained displaced, the majority-minority of whom labelled “refugees” in their own country. The hurricane had blown the sequins off the Big Easy’s carefree façade, stripping away the ideological veneer and laying bare its stark inequities, yet its soul was somehow intact*.

The criminal incompetence and indifference of the emergency response to Katrina (I remember tractor trailers full of supplies idling for days in Gloucester, MA waiting for instructions from FEMA) illustrated how there is no such thing as a “natural” disaster in the Anthropocene. “Acts of God” are increasingly triggered and mismanaged by acts of man.

As a political scientist and cultural historian, I am interested in how issues of power, control, resources, and justice are framed; how such narratives are deployed and contested; and (as an geographer at heart if not by training) how these cultural systems codependently interact with the environmental systems that underwrite them. The theme of “land, life and labor” exploitation of the New Orleans campus seems to me particularly salient for my interdisciplinary instincts and social science perspective. I look forward to meeting, working, and learning with you all.

*PS: The soul of New Orleans, which restored my faith in America during the dark years of the W administration (remember when we thought it couldn’t get worse?), is also what led my daughter to adopt the city as her own for the past five years, and inevitably led her parents to keep a wary weather eye on the Gulf and cancer alley. Actually both my daughters (like all sons and daughters of their generation) are on the front lines of the Anthropocene, as my youngest is a budding environmental scientist. So, my desire to understand the systems and scale of these issues is personal as well as political.