The importance of studying disasters has grown in recent decades due mainly to the confluence of increasingly complex drivers of risk and natural hazards, including extreme weather conditions that are now understood as having partially anthropogenic causes. By examining the social production of conditions that render some people more at risk than others, perspectives from anthropology, history, and political ecology have shown that disasters are not simply the result of natural forces. In disaster studies, this expanded paradigm defines disasters in terms of hazard-vulnerability interactions, which, in the genealogy of Western thinking, maps onto the nature-culture binary (Gaillard, 2022). Although the human/social dimension of disasters has long been recognized through the concept of vulnerability (Hewitt, 1983), the term natural disasters, along with its underlying assumptions, persists (Hoffman & Oliver-Smith, 2019), as signaled by the prominence of geophysicalist approaches to disaster risk reduction. Drawing upon the environmental humanities, disaster anthropology, and island studies, this research project investigates the manifestation of such responses in the archipelagic Eastern Visayas administrative region in the Philippines—particularly since the devastating 2013 typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan). I will be looking especially at creative and discursive expressions of place and its hazards in order to explore how cultural processes and expressions like images and stories may help articulate and perform alternative modes of thinking and being that can contribute to decolonizing disaster studies. Mobilizing the concept of hazardscape, the project aims to emphasize, not the hazard-focused approaches endorsed by techno-scientific discourses on disaster, but rather people’s material entanglements in their lived environment, which are now proving to be more and more precarious. Grasping these entanglements in a natural hazard hot-spot like the Philippines where hazards are a frequent life experience (Bankoff, 2007), requires that hazardousness be understood as not only a bounded, local phenomenon (Hewitt & Burton, 1971), but also one that characterizes and traverses vast regions of the world (Bankoff, 2016). This perspective feeds into the project’s engagement with island studies to reckon with what the island/archipelagic spatialities of isolation, relation, and assemblage can precipitate or foster in preparing for disasters.
Supervisor: Professor Kate Rigby