240518 SE MM3 Critical disaster studies (2024W)

The main objective of this course is to approach natural and human-made disasters from an anthropological perspective which emphasizes sociocultural dimensions of disasters. The course will introduce concepts of disaster, risk, crisis, catastrophe, hazard, security, resilience, and vulnerability while giving an overview about various forms of disasters, i.e. earthquakes, climate change, chemical spills, nuclear disasters, genocide etc. It will be followed by anthropological contributions that fill research gaps of other disciplines, mainly by scrutinizing sociocultural and political dimensions of disasters and their role in cultural change. Disasters open windows into larger social and societal realities. Anthropologists study roots and effects of disasters within unequal and uneven development of social justice systems and social policies that prefigure disasters. How are disasters experienced in everyday lives across different class, ethnicity, race, and gender? How does chronical vulnerability become an acute problem in times of disasters? Accordingly, experiences of loss, trauma, grief, and memory that shape culture will be explored. Further, the course will engage students with political and economic reasons and outcomes of disasters. It will investigate complex relationship between ideology, state, governmentality, power, and disasters. Ethnographic examples will show how political interests define risk that shape disaster policies and how disasters become means of profits of public and private actors across local, national, and global economic interests while causing range of vulnerabilities for local populations.