Disasters and Politics: Materials, Experiments, Preparedness

Sociological Review Monograph Series

Overview

The book is organized in three sections. Each section focuses on a different problem of the relationship between disasters and politics. It starts with "Materials: Ontologies" that circles around the issue of how to conceive of disasters once we take seriously the non-human and material nature of disasters. The second section,  "Experiments: Governance," focuses on collective political experiments. These articles deal with different ways of deploying heterogeneous technologies for managing disasters, technologies that are in each case contested, challenged, and mutable. The third and last section, "Preparedness: Anticipation," focuses on the fact that disasters exist and create political (re)arrangements without even happening.

These articles draw in various ways on the notion of disasters as politics and politics as disasters. As the section titles make clear, some focus on temporal aspects, some on material and others on those of governance. Where they all converge is to turn the relationship between disasters and politics into a problem. The problem we face is not how to react to existing disasters. The problem we face is how to live in this world knowing that we produce innumerable disasters, which ones we want to prepare for, and how we want to live together in the wake of acknowledging these disasters. These articles are but a first step to answering these questions.