Professor Dr Franz Krause

Thursday (April 16, 2026 – July 23, 2026) | 10.00 – 11.30 
Seminargebäude,  Room S 22

Based on anthropological perspectives and critiques, this course questions common assumptions about disasters, disaster prevention, and reconstruction. We will examine concepts of risk, uncertainty, vulnerability, and resilience using theoretical and ethnographic literature. Based on various examples, the course illustrates how disasters must be understood as social, political, economic, and cultural phenomena rather than natural events. Among other issues, we will discuss gender-specific and colonial experiences of disasters.

• Barrios, Roberto E. 2017. ‘What Does Catastrophe Reveal for Whom? The Anthropology of Crises and Disasters at the Onset of the Anthropocene’. Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (1): 151–66. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041635
• Button, Gregory V., and Mark Schuller, eds. 2016. Contextualizing Disaster: Globalization, Media, and the Construction of Catastrophe. Berghahn.
• Hoffman, Susannah M., and Anthony Oliver-Smith, eds. 2002. Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster. School of American Research Press.
• Oliver-Smith, Anthony, and Susannah M. Hoffman, eds. 2020. The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective. Second edition. Routledge.

Further information for students of the University of Cologne: Klips