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 becoming more frequent worldwide as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change. By examining the social production of conditions that render some people more at risk than others, perspectives from anthropology, history, geography, and political ecology have shown that disasters are not the result purely 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 studies, and island studies, this dissertation examines how such discourses and approaches are potentially challenged by artistic and creative figurations of disaster in the archipelagic Eastern Visayas administrative region of the Philippines. Underscoring the region’s hazards and history of disasters, particularly in the context of the devastating 2013 super-typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan), it elaborates on the ways images, stories, and concepts coming from those directly affected by disasters constitute a “hermeneutics of eco-catastrophe” (Rigby, 2015) that may help articulate and perform alternative modes of thinking and becoming that can nuance dominant disaster imaginaries. The research also engages methods in ethnography to explore how creativity and/in everyday life speak to human-nonhuman co-emergence and possibly point toward an ecological imagination through which hazardousness, vulnerability, and resilience can be figured as conditions and capacities that are neither exclusively human nor exclusively nonhuman.
Eastern Visayas is recast into “the Visayan Pacific” to complicate the conventional scale of the nation-state while gesturing toward a deeper geological and broader planetary spatio-temporality, as disasters and hazardousness must be understood not simply as bounded, local phenomena (Hewitt & Burton, 1971), but as historically contingent processes that originate beyond the local and traverse vast regions of the world (Bankoff, 2016). This perspective feeds into the dissertation’s engagement with island studies to speculate on what the island/archipelagic spatialities of isolation, relation, and assemblage can precipitate or foster in preparing for disasters. Through these strands of inquiry, the dissertation proposes the decolonial and more-than-human concept of the island kataragman.
Supervisor: Professor Kate Rigby