De-colonizing Disasters: Affect, race, and queer theory

De-colonizing Disasters: Affect, race, and queer theory Passed

Thursday September 23, 2021 13:00 - 15:00 E

Workshop leader: Omer Aijazi
Presenters: Adam Doering, Andrea J. Nightingale, Emily Eyestone, Omer Aijazi, Sarani Pitor Pakan

Disasters as Socionatural Displacements: time, materiality and affect, Andrea Nightingale, Linus Rosen, Noemi Gonda
Towards a Geopoetics of Disaster: The Place of Glissant in Postcolonial Disaster Studies, Emily Eyestone
Disasters as Betrayal, Omer Aijazi
Return to Surf: Re-understanding the Sea among Local Surfers in Post-Tsunami Settings, Sarani Pitor Pakan, Adam Doering

Panel organiser

A disaster is not only a sudden, de-stabilizing event but an affective complex that hinges on the already in place structures of violence and diminishment such as colonial occupation, conflict, poverty, heteronormativity, whiteness, and other forms of structural harms. The panel seeks to understand “natural” disasters as interruptions of joy; as forms of dysphoria that reorganize relationships and the expectations, one has from life and each other. The panel attempts to inspire new vocabularies on disaster aftermaths and redirects attention away from institutional and external therapeutic processes in favor of broader imaginaries on the seepage of disaster into everyday worldmaking. In this way, the panel seeks to expand the parameters of the field of disaster studies to embrace de-colonial, subaltern, and critical approaches for the study of disaster, its aftermaths, and survivors. Papers are invited from diverse theoretical and methodological standpoints from any context which address some of the following themes (but not limited to) in fresh and provocative ways:

Feeling, living, and embodying disaster

Narrative and first-person accounts of disaster

Troubling the binaries of disaster/everyday life

The convergence of disaster with other forms of diminishment

Disaster and decoloniality

Disaster and heteronormativity

Disaster and whiteness/race

Disaster and dysphoria

Queering disaster

Affective methodologies for the study of disaster

Lecturers

Omer Aijazi Workshop leader

Brunel University London

Adam Doering Presenter

Wakayama University

Andrea J. Nightingale Presenter

Professor
University of Oslo

Andrea J. Nightingale is Professor of Human Geography, University of Oslo and Research Fellow, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. She has over 25 years of experience leading research projects on environmental governance in multiple parts of the world and doing consultancies in development contexts. Her current research seeks to account for power and politics within dynamic and unpredictable environmental change. She works with critical international development and political economy theories in relation to: climate change adaptation and transformation debates; collective action and state formation; the environment-society nexus; political violence in natural resource governance; and feminist work on emotion and subjectivity in relation to development, transformation, collective action and cooperation. Her research has developed methodologies that integrate different kinds of data across scales to gain a richer picture of socio-environmental change (using biophysical, remote sensing, qualitative social-political and ethnographic methods). Her work in Nepal has traced the Local Adaptation Plans of Action (LAPA), beginning with global efforts to support National Adaptation Plans of Action (NAPAs), to the national dialogue in Nepal, to the District and grassroots level implementation. She has collaborated closely with development practitioners and colleagues in Nepal, India, Kenya, Nicaragua, Uganda, Scotland, and globally for over two decades. Her career has been research and teaching focused, while remaining deeply connected to the everyday challenges on the ground in low-income countries, including several consultancies with international projects. She has over 50 academic journal articles, numerous popular science articles and her recent book is Environment and Sustainability in a Globalizing World, Routledge, 2019.