Journal of Disaster Studies An Inaugural Discussion

scott gabriel knowles The many conversations that led to the creation of this journal stretch back five years or more, on multiple continents, in conferences and workshops and field schools and hallway chats and text messages. A consensus was gathering among disaster researchers that we would like to create a new space for discovery and exchange. Disaster studies is an interdisciplinary meeting ground, not a field per se, and disaster studies scholars are members of many different communities simultaneously. This is a strength of disaster studies as an analytical engine—it absorbs and applies multiple methods, casework, geographies, and temporalities in the pursuit of making sense of disaster as a social process. In founding the journal, we pulled together nine members of an editorial collective to steward the work, and in this inaugural issue we decided it might serve readers well to hear from this collective to gain some insight into our backgrounds and aspirations for this scholarly venture. The following is a conversation among the members of the collective. In the time since this discussion took place Sulfikar Amir has joined the editorial board and Kaira Zoe Canete has joined the editorial collective. The text has been edited for clarity.

ksenia chmutina We got together because we wanted to discuss why we all ended up being involved in this journal and wanted to explore what it is that we actually want for disaster studies. To me disaster studies is kind of all-encompassing. I’m really enjoying being a political scientist—which is my undergraduate degree—in an engineering faculty, because somehow I ended up doing a PhD in engineering and then found a postdoc with a civil engineer who needed someone to work on case studies. Disasters were never really a subject that I thought I would end up researching and focusing on and being so fascinated with. It was a pure accident, but you know I’m glad that I’m here!

scott gabriel knowles Well I’m glad, too, Ksenia, and I want to note at the outset how lucky I feel that we decided to fill a big tent with researchers when we put this editorial collective together. I think the people in this discussion reflect the many possibilities for disaster studies as an inclusive, bridging field. I came to disaster research as a historian of technology, writing a dissertation about fires in nineteenth century American cities, and trying to understand fire and disaster more generally as a key part of industrial urbanization, not just some set of accidents to be overcome (or forgotten!). I was tearing through John McPhee and Mike Davis books as fast as possible. I was in the middle of this research on September 11, 2001, and that changed everything for me. I watched in real time as George W. Bush defined that day as the start of a war, when I saw what happened in New York as a predictable (and long predicted by fire experts) technological failure. The devil was in the safety standards. Making that case, looking into literal structures and also policy structures that perpetuate disaster was totally absorbing for me. I thought about ditching academia and going to work for Underwriters Laboratories! (I never told anyone that before.)

I was so focused on American cases that when the great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi triple disaster happened in 2011, I realized in a hurry how little I knew about the rest of the world and how much I wanted to know. I only utilized English as a research language before 2011. I still had a very “event” focused concept of disaster. I had only done a few collaborations with disaster survivors and bereaved families. Honestly, I’d spent almost all of my time in the archives and with other academic experts. I’ve used my time since then trying to compensate for those deficits. Today I live in South Korea, I put together 501 episodes of COVIDCalls interviews during the pandemic, and I work continually in partnership with bereaved family and survivor groups, like the Sewol Ferry 4.16 Institute of Democratic Citizenship Education. I am still learning how to do ethnography, but I’m an eager student. I’d say that each of the people in this discussion have been crucial in helping me with my continuing education.

ksenia chmutina To me, the biggest excitement and the biggest challenge in disaster studies is our commitment to each other. I think our collaboration here, this new journal, is a really nice example of that. The disaster studies manifesto that sets out the principles for more respectful, reciprocal, and genuine relationships between “local” and “external” researchers in disaster studies is another great example of this. There is still too much focus on disasters as individual events and as technocratic problems, and this fits well with the neoliberal tendency to externalize disasters and increase marginalization and suffering. In my view, too many scholars are simply co-opted into this narrative. So it’s great to be part of this collective that really challenges a normative approach to disaster risk production, that questions the root causes of disasters and emphasizes that disasters are a political process, a manifestation of power.

Anyway, you know I’m sure Scott and I can spend the whole day talking about this. So let’s bring our coeditors on board and see what they think about this new initiative. We would like all of you to tell us: How did you become involved in disaster studies? What brought you into disaster research. Jacob Remes, I’ll start with you.

jacob remes My short biographical answer is that I was in graduate school being trained as a labor historian of the North American Progressive era at the beginning of the twentieth century when Hurricane Katrina happened. I was trying to think about this question: How did the modern, contemporary state get built? And when Katrina happened, there was all of this attention to the state, state capacity, and how people acted when it appeared—although falsely appeared—as if the state wasn’t there. Watching Katrina and its aftermath opened up lots of new questions to me. Then, of course, if I was in graduate school for Katrina, it also means I was in graduate school for the Indian Ocean tsunami, for the Haiti earthquake, and, soon after I graduated, for the Japanese 3.11 triple disaster. All these contemporary events, and the discourses surrounding them, shaped my scholarship as a labor historian of the United States and Canada.

The slightly longer answer is that I went into disaster scholarship as a historian, thinking about how disasters were moments to understand how people develop new ideas about, how they question, and how they make new demands in their relationships with their employers, their families, and their governments. But as I became more of a disaster scholar I began to realize that disasters weren’t just a way to see into history; they weren’t just events that create archives. Disaster, as a concept, is also a category that has helped structure modern life. It has made some suffering seem normal, acceptable, even needed, and made other types of suffering abnormal, unacceptable, and requiring special deployment of government power and human solidarity. That opened up a whole field for me, and that’s what I hope we’re going to be exploring in the journal.

ksenia chmutina Kim, let me ask you the same question. What brought you into disaster research?

kim fortun I definitely did not come into disaster research looking for disasters or at all aware of the overwhelming complexity of disaster characterization and response. I was trained in the heart of cultural anthropology, in a quite theoretical vein, inspired as much by literary studies as by the classic social sciences. From the outset, a key concern was what I thought of as “ethical imaginaries”—the varied ways people in different cultural, organizational, and generational contexts conceive of what is right, wrong, possible, and obligatory, in their own lives and in the societies they live in. Following from this, I went to India for PhD fieldwork (in 1989!) to study environmental movements and ethics. After a few detours, I ended up working for the next few years in Bhopal, in central India, where there was a horrific chemical plant disaster in 1984 resulting from failed operations of a Union Carbide pesticide factory. I was there six years after the disaster, when the issue was in the courts and survivors needed help writing complaints and advocacy documents in English (the language of Indian courts). So I was very engaged with disaster survivors and their advocates throughout my fieldwork and had to quickly learn how to write both fast and in ways tuned to urgent practical needs. It was humbling, to say the least. It also was deeply memorable. What I learned in Bhopal continues to ground and orient my work. It also has kept me tuned to questions about ethical imaginaries, in ways tightly tethered to real-world needs and practices. I want my work to build understanding of ways often unstated ethical commitments—and omissions—both create and can help offset risk and disaster.

ksenia chmutina I love learning about these different starts and personal experiences with disasters. Julia, what about you? How did you end up here?

julia irwin I was just thinking the same thing—and realizing the diverse and varied experiences among the members of our collective. I describe myself as a historian of US foreign assistance and international humanitarianism. In my mind, my “real” entry into disaster studies came with my second book project; however, I actually began thinking about this subject during my dissertation research. The first book I wrote (which was based on that dissertation) focused on US foreign aid during the First World War era. While conducting this research, I also came across instances of US humanitarian responses to earthquakes, floods, and other disasters caused by natural hazards, which sparked my initial interest in the topic of disaster aid. I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, maybe I could write a book on this. Maybe this can be the next project.” Roughly ten years later, that project is finally completed! I recently finished a book on the history of US foreign disaster aid, titled Catastrophic Diplomacy, which explores the messy politics of disaster assistance throughout the twentieth century.

My own thinking about disasters has developed a lot over the years in the process of doing this research and writing this second book. When I started this project, for instance, I told people I was writing about US responses to “natural” disasters, something I would never say anymore. My thinking on what counts as a disaster and how societies understand them has shifted considerably. Something else that I’ve thought about a lot lately relates to what Jacob said earlier: Why do we think of certain events as worthy of a humanitarian response, while other forms of suffering and inequity don’t generate that same type of reaction? In addition, I’ve become intrigued by the ways we categorize different types of disasters (for example, the distinction we draw between “wartime” and “peacetime” crises). And finally, I’ve grown interested in the links between disaster relief and development assistance and between human rights and humanitarianism. Through the study of disasters, we can think about all of these different types of categories, the politics and ideological premises that inform our responses to crises and the ways they shape international relations.

ksenia chmutina I need a copy of your book! That is super interesting.

scott gabriel knowles Monica let’s bring you into this now. What about you? How did you find yourself in disaster scholarship?

monica sanders Well, I came into this from a deeply personal experience as well as a practical experience. I am a native New Orleanian, and I was stuck in the city during Hurricane Katrina. I actually started law school a month late that year at an external institution because of the impacts of the storm. I have a very clear and visceral memory, because most of my family that have graduate degrees—they are doctors and lawyers—this is a typical Afro-American and immigrant story, so I had never been exposed to people in higher education outside of the professional fields. And I have a very clear memory of being at a reunification center because we were looking for family members. A researcher thought it was her right to begin to interview my little brother without parental consent. So I walked away from that with a couple of things: that what I was going do with my law degree changed entirely in that moment and that I was going to understand what it meant to do disaster research.

Before those experiences during Katrina, my plan was to spend that summer in New Orleans enjoying family and resting. I had just spent seven years in broadcast journalism, much of that on work related to 9/11. I was tired of extreme situations and actually looking forward to working more in the broadcast industry from a different perspective. I planned to become an entertainment lawyer. Then Katrina happened. As many New Orleanians will tell you, it bifurcated our lives into “before” and “after” the storm. My “before” plan went out the window. After the storm, I was called to advocate and then to work on disaster law and governance. Now, when I talk to my disaster law students I joke, “Oh, if there’s a multiverse in some other version or 2.0 I’m an entertainment lawyer, and none of these things ever happen.”

I began to understand disaster studies, as you pointed out, because we tend to take this neoliberal construct that isolates the picture into one vertical, and I would argue it even more at times isolates it from the human experience and the impact that our work has—positive or negative—on the communities we ostensibly seek to serve. And I see that my mission is to see how can we develop that so that we bring that connection between humanity and the actual research together in a more meaningful way, so that one informs the other.

I had my mind made up that I was going to track that researcher down and inform her about parental consent, property, loss, and I did find her actually, and I won’t say the place where she is, and I let her know that I had figured out how to hold researchers accountable for such things in between my twenties and my thirties. But another piece of it is looking at what kind of rights communities have. I contributed to a book with some of my fellow attorneys about these types of responsibilities, and I’m working with my students on another piece about making sure that we recognize trespass properly, including the law, property, and other rights to the human body. When we’re going in to do research, I see myself as at times a partner and at times an antagonist, and at other times a developer in this space. I’m happy to have consistently found interdisciplinary and open spaces, where we can be creative and critical and rethink what this field should shape up to be.

ksenia chmutina That’s amazing. I really love this answer. Thanks for telling us. You know it’s super interesting, and good luck to that researcher. Sulfikar, let me ask you the same question. How did you end up in disaster scholarship?

sulfikar amir Thank you so much for the questions, and similar to some people here I will start with my personal experience. Actually I did not start my academic career in disaster studies. I was trained as an STS (science, technology, and society) scholar. So my first projects related to technological politics and specifically on nuclear politics in Southeast Asia. And I did that project for a couple of years, until I discovered that the influence of the Japanese nuclear industry on the nuclear program landscape in Southeast Asia is huge. So I decided to see it because I thought I should know what exactly the nuclear industry looks like in Japan and how they manage their safety. Would they be able to export their technology safely to other countries? So in 2009 I visited Japan, and I was lucky that I got access to visit one of the largest nuclear power stations, which is Fukushima Daiichi. I was allowed to enter reactor unit number one. So I still remember, still have this vivid memory of entering into this facility. It was so fascinating, but at the same time I was a bit nervous because that was my first time visiting. I know nuclear power stations. We have to wear the hazmat suit, and we went through a safety check a couple of times. I was really impressed. It was very clear that it was disciplined and well organized. And then, two years later at Fukushima the reactor unit number one exploded. I was really shocked by the fact that it exploded. I began to think that, well, I have to switch my attention to these events—it’s very personal. But also there’s something there that really challenged my way of thinking about the relationship between technology, disaster, and modern society. So that’s how I started.

I expanded my study areas to include other nonnuclear disasters, including, of course, in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia. And what I’m really interested in unpacking by using the concept of disaster studies involves the institutional aspect of a disaster. My experience with Fukushima told me that this is basically a process, and the process started long, long before the disaster happened, long before the disaster was initiated by a shock. So that’s my framework. It led me to develop a new way of thinking about how disaster is constructed and how the institutional capacity is developed. The power relations, export politics, as well as the role of civil society are all intertwined in the production of crisis. I think this is something that becomes the center of my analysis.

ksenia chmutina So far, it sounds like none of us were determined from the age of five that we had to do disaster scholarship. Rodolfo, were you that kid who always wanted to be a disaster scholar?

rodolfo hernandez Not at all. In 2008, I moved to China. I’m a Colombian anthropologist, and back in that year I got a scholarship from the Chinese government, as part of a south-south cooperation program. I was a little bit ignorant about the political issues happening there. For example, when I arrived in Beijing, I was shocked about this very symbolic era: Beijing was celebrating the Summer Olympics, which served the national leadership to advertise the socialist market economy and renewed the narrative of national pride beyond sports. Not long after, when I moved to the city of Wuhan, now world famous for COVID-19, I did my master’s degree. I learned other versions behind that image projecting the new China. For example, many people were displaced from rural areas due to the Three Gorges Dam project, which little by little became a slow disaster.

After graduating with my master’s degree, after studying environmental risks, I went back to Beijing to earn my Ph.D. I was then more concerned about environmental pollution, especially the air quality issue. Air pollution was one of the environmental problems produced by thirty years of the centralized economy and the excessive use of coal, a dirty industry that was key to propelling the new market economy. So once I was well aware of how this was working in different areas of the country, not only in Beijing, not only Wuhan, but also in Shanghai, all the developed east coast, I decided to study it. At the same time, I met Kim and Mike Fortun, who mentored me in a project related to air quality and environmental health issues. We worked together for six years, trying to understand the common issues in different cities in the world related to environmental governance and air pollution. So I would say it was a process that started to be more and more academic, and it ended up in an interesting, international academic space for me.

ksenia chmutina It’s amazing how being in certain places at certain times really shapes academic careers. It seems to be particularly prominent in disaster scholarship.

scott gabriel knowles Yes absolutely. I’m also fascinated by the ways that both individual disasters like Bhopal or September 11 are catalytic, but also slow processes like air pollution and victim advocacy have brought us here to this table. Jen, what about you?

jen henderson It’s been amazing listening to your stories. It’s fascinating to hear how we all came into this space. I work a lot with meteorologists, and they have origin stories that go back to when they were five years old and many became fascinated with weather—some hazard or disaster with personal impacts. And this is what led them to their careers. So I’m interested in how people identify their passion.

I was not a social scientist until my Ph.D. I started as a creative writer with an MFA in nonfiction writing. And when I moved to Virginia Tech from Kansas State, I became fascinated with tornadoes and storms, I learned that there was a storm chase group in the meteorology department that took students in a few vans out onto the Great Plains to understand how to predict storms as part of a field studies course. So I wrote a proposal to join them, to document from a writerly perspective what it was like to experience this culture of storm chasing. In May 2008, after a week on the road, we busted, as they say in the meteorological community. There weren’t many storms to chase, so we were kind of ping-ponging around the Midwest and Plains, trying to find things to do to entertain two vans of eighteen- to twenty-year-old students. We ended up in this little town called Saragosa, Texas. This one stop turned into a great learning opportunity from the perspective of the leaders of that trip, Dave Carrol and Kevin Myatt. They took these students to this small town to show them what it looked like years after a tornado had decimated a place. So we drove into town, a very small rural community, and we had an amazingly fortuitous experience talking to a woman who had lived through the tornado, which struck the town in 1984. This woman had survived this tornado with her family. She told us stories about how she was a young girl of sixteen or so at the time, and she had an infant in her arms, and the baby had been pulled out of her arms by the winds. The baby was found alive and unharmed, but the woman’s mother, who was sheltering nearby, had been killed. Looking around the town, you could still see evidence that it had not recovered. It was—and is still—a largely Hispanic, Spanish-speaking community. There were no warning systems in town at the time. A lone storm chaser had driven into town minutes before the tornado struck, ran into a building surrounded by cars—the community center—and yelled, “Tornado!” Most of the town were all attending a kindergarten graduation so with the warning, everyone took cover. Connecting the novice expertise of these young students with the kinds of responsibilities of their profession—it fascinated me. And this was all amid a kind of emotional time for the students, because we had just experienced a shooting at Virginia Tech the year before, and we had lost thirty-two people—students, faculty, staff. Standing in front of the community memorial [in Saragosa], we realized they had lost thirty people. While these details didn’t seem to connect in an obvious way, you could feel the students become very somber and reflective about their own experiences with loss. The violence and trauma of these events combined in that one moment to form a collective empathy and grief. As a creative writer, this was a great story. But I realized that I needed more tools, so to speak, to understand and study the deeper issues felt by the group, illustrated in the landscape. I wanted to write about what I’d observed, but from a different perspective. I wanted to understand why there were no warning mechanisms to tell people about the danger. Who were the experts that issue these warnings? Why were these communities not able to rebuild? So I started from there.

I ended up interviewing the National Weather Service forecaster who issued the warnings for Saragosa. He’d won an award for his work with warnings that day. Yet as the years had passed, it became clear that this person was very traumatized by that experience of losing so many lives, “on his watch” as he said. He had traveled to Saragosa a few days after the tornado to conduct what the National Weather Service calls a service assessment, a type of damage assessment. He saw that destruction and death firsthand and couldn’t reconcile it—even thirty years later when I spoke to him. And so I think that experience for me was the genesis of going back for my Ph.D. in science and technology studies to grapple with expertise and the ethical dimensions of forecaster practices, warning systems, and disaster policies. In doing so, I found a real asymmetry in the literature. Most people study members of the public—understandably so. It’s an important aspect of research to know how people in different communities are impacted. But there wasn’t much research on the experts in the weather community—the broadcast meteorologists, the forecasters, the emergency managers. So I sort of saw that as my space to make their challenges visible, to “study up” within their ranks, to learn alongside them about their sociotechnical systems and how much these experts deeply care for the communities in which they work. To this day, I’m an embedded social scientist in the weather community in the United States, and I spend 90 percent of my time with the experts, with the practitioners attending their conferences, their professional organizational meetings, and really studying these institutions and agencies from within to help pose changes that improve public safety. More recently I’ve become really interested in compounding and cascading hazards and disasters, and how those things are challenged by the warning systems that currently exist in the United States.

scott gabriel knowles I’m going to shift gears a bit here for a minute, because I’m always fascinated to find out where disaster researchers find inspiration. It isn’t easy work, quite often it is really grim. I will just start by saying that for me it is John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a book that I have read and reread innumerable times. I keep a stack of them in my office and give them to anyone who comes by, especially students just starting out in disaster research. One more thing: when I’m writing I usually have Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot playing, at least when I’m starting. The record came out literally a week after September 11, meaning it was recorded before that day—a fact which still totally baffles me—how did they capture the emotions and soundscape of those times so well, and before the disaster? I’m still thinking about that one, but it surely speaks to disasters as context-specific cultural processes, not just detached, destructive acts.

Rodolfo, what is a book or song or artwork—any inspiring work—that keeps you excited and focused on disasters as an area of research? Something you return to again and again?

rodolfo hernandez For me it’s a 1990s song by the Colombian rock band Aterciopelados titled “Siervo sin Tierra” (Landless Siervo). It draws inspiration from a 1950s book of the same name by Colombian journalist Eduardo Caballero Calderón. The song’s lyrics vividly capture the story of Siervo, a hard-working peasant in the Andes Mountains, striving to own his land amid political conflict. What’s striking is how this tale of landlessness and turmoil in Colombia transcends time, remaining relevant in 1950, the 1990s, and even 2024. It’s a powerful reminder of the ongoing struggle for land ownership in the face of political upheaval, resonating with the experiences of Siervos and Siervas across generations.

jacob remes This is a great question. There are many in different genres and registers, so I’m going to cheat and give you three answers. The book I always have in my mind when I write about disaster is Kai Erikson’s Everything in Its Path. Most obviously, Erikson is a beautiful writer, but more than that, his whole project is also a model of deeply humane, ethical disaster scholarship. It’s the model I wish all of us held up for how to write about disaster. But I don’t think you’re asking about scholarship, no matter how humane and beautiful. The real cultural artifact I return to in my mind is Makoto Shinkai’s 2016 film Your Name. There’s a lot in it, but what I think about all the time is the scene in which high school children who know that their town is about to be wiped out by an asteroid try desperately to warn their neighbors, going so far as to commandeer the public address system and order an unauthorized evacuation—but they are ignored and then punished by their elders. Your Name is a direct response to 3.11, but it also feels like how politicians, businessmen, and other decision makers have treated young people who are trying to stave off climate change. Finally, to cheat a little bit more, I often have in mind a different type of human production, which is the production of suffering. As it happens, I wrote a big chunk of my dissertation—the project that became my first book—in the western Japanese city of Okayama. The apartment where I lived, the coffee shops where I wrote, the library where I once got kicked out for unauthorized use of a microfilm machine—they were all in the part of the city that was destroyed by American firebombing the night of June 29, 1945. The human capacity and willingness to destroy cities and their inhabitants, whether by war or other means, is never far from my mind when I research disaster. (I should maybe also point out that the story of Okayama doesn’t end at its destruction; like postwar Japanese society, the apartment building, the coffee shops, the library were all built on the rubble, which is to say in addition to destroying cities, humans work together to build anew.)

jen henderson I return to poetry as a respite from the emotional toll of disaster work: Mary Oliver, Jane Hirshfield, Pattiann Rogers, to name a few. I also blast Queen’s “Under Pressure” pretty frequently.

monica sanders Because I still work in Louisiana so much and spend time with fellow disaster survivors in other communities, that is what keeps me inspired to work.

julia irwin I have lived in the Gulf South region of the United States for the past fourteen years—thirteen of them in the state of Florida, and now in Louisiana. As a result, hurricane season has become a key part of my annual rhythm. A few years ago, I happened to reread Zora Neal Hurston’s classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. A climactic point in the novel is the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, one of the deadliest disasters to ever occur in the state of Florida. I was absolutely blown away by Hurston’s ability to capture this event in all its complexity: the incredible force of the hurricane winds and waters, the devastating impacts the disaster had on African American agricultural laborers, the agonizing choice of whether to flee or to ride out the storm. It remains one of the most eloquent and moving literary evocations of disaster I’ve read. Though I am a historian, not a novelist, her powerful portrayal inspires me to bring the same empathy and emotion into my own scholarship.

ksenia chmutina Let’s talk about the journal a little bit more specifically now. Jacob, you were at the start of conceiving this journal and talking through the ideas. But we do have quite a few journals in the field, right? So why do you think the field of disaster studies needs a new journal?

jacob remes I think one of the answers to that question comes from the fact that all of us came to study disaster from other interests and other fields. I think—hope—what makes this journal different from others is that we aim for it to be a home for people who are thinking about disasters from many different fields, bringing with them many different sets of questions. That interdisciplinary conversation will, I hope, provoke and give space to many new questions and many new theories. Another way to put it is to recall when I realized that I was a disaster scholar and not just a historian. Surveying my new field, there didn’t seem to be a disaster studies journal that I would publish in or that I wanted to read. That’s not to say there was no article in any disaster studies journal I ever found useful—of course there were, many—but that as a collection or a community, no journal has felt like it could be an intellectual home. There was no journal that would publish a literature scholar’s discussion of catastrophe in contemporary novels, say, and also an ethnography of meteorologists and a historical discussion of an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century disaster. Those interdisciplinary conversations are happening, but I haven’t seen them yet in a journal.

I mentioned before that I was trained as a labor historian. In the US labor history field, we’re all trained that our goal is to produce scholarship that is useful for the contemporary labor movement. I take that impulse into disaster studies. So while I want this journal to publish the scholarship and conversations from the theoretical disaster studies realm that I inhabit, I also want it to help enrich the thinking of disaster practitioners. And I include the accidental practitioners who “practice” in the disaster field because they happen to live and work in dangerous locations. So I want this to be a journal that not only theoreticians read, but also practitioners read and publish in, because I think it’s in those interstices, those conversations, that the really exciting work is happening.

ksenia chmutina We talked a lot, when we started this journal, about our different commitments and the expectations from the journal. So for you, Kim, what is the core commitment that you see this journal is holding?

kim fortun I hope JDS will cultivate and publish disaster scholarship that is extensively historicized, extensively contextualized, and extensively combinatorial, addressing the way failures of technical systems are always interlaced with failures of political, economic, social and cultural systems, operating at many scales (local to global and planetary). JDS should be known for disaster portrayals that are high-dimensional and memorably expansive. There is a wealth of scholarship in this vein that we can build on, published in diverse venues. Hopefully JDS can be a place where we are continually refining ways to build and textually craft such scholarship. JDS thus needs to be more than a publication; it also needs to build and support a creative community of practice.

scott gabriel knowles I might just build on what Kim said about the global and local scales of research briefly. Exploring that tension has been a real motivating factor for me in wanting to start this journal. I guess you could say it is the challenge of the Anthropocene: how to chart global disaster while not losing track of the fact that harms are experienced locally.

One thing I’ve learned since moving to South Korea in 2021, and something I should have already known, is the real problem of translation in disaster studies. I mean language, of course, the ever-expanding hegemon of English-language academic publishing. But also more conceptually, the challenge of bringing local and national culture, styles of governance, and historical trajectories into comparison. From the start we plan to publish articles in multiple languages and make sure our editorial collective and editorial board reflect a truly global approach. It’s not enough to say you are doing global disaster studies and have the editors and articles all come from North America.

ksenia chmutina This kind of understanding will not just happen through some kind of “normal” research, right? What we see today is very much Anglophone research in disaster studies. There are, of course, some outlets in Spanish now, which is great to see. But most of the scholarship is published in English, and what we referee is very much Anglophone heavy.

rodolfo hernandez It’s been my struggle. I mentioned before that I was ten years in China, exposed to a different language and a new worldview. I was trying to understand the cultural, political, and social narratives that China was exposing to the world, not only learning Mandarin. About that same time, I was leaning toward studying STS scholarship from the West. So trying to articulate both views was really a challenge. Not to mention going back again to Colombia after graduating and coming more recently to the United States. I have been exposed to the difficulties of interacting, adapting, and adopting different languages through that journey. I’m really happy that my experience and personal journey has echoed the space of multilingualism here. I was amazed by how many of us have experiences with language limitations and the curiosity to understand people’s worldviews in disaster contexts. Many of you have challenged that through different writing styles and thinking about how people think in the disaster contexts and the words they use, from emergency practitioners and first responders to victims and decision makers.

So my current view is not only about translating languages in the journal, what typically others would do, but really giving a full thought about what disasters are and how they are interpreted in different cultural contexts. That’s the feeling I have now toward this project, and I hope that we will really engage that in the first issues and the years to come.

ksenia chmutina I’m really excited about this multilingual dimension that the journal will offer. This is something I struggle with, because in my own head I cannot reconcile Anglophone terms with the terms in Russian or Mandarin. I somehow can’t think about my work in those languages because it’s not just the matter of translation as you say, but the context and the exposure. It’s just not as simple as it may sound—and I think we don’t give enough emphasis to the pluriversality of the meaning of disasters. And perhaps sometimes scholars don’t want to accept this because then it destroys the simple and clear narrative of an “objective” science. It is part of the problem with the academy in general, that people are not willing to evolve and acknowledge that maybe what they’ve been doing before is wrong. As our thinking evolves, we need to challenge each other. Julia, what’s your biggest frustration with disaster scholarship?

julia irwin This is a really tricky question—largely because it asks me to criticize a field that I’m really very excited about. But I suppose the frustrations I have build on what Jacob, Scott, and Kim have just said. We often “talk the talk” of engaging in interdisciplinary research and conversations without really succeeding in doing so. We become stuck in our disciplinary silos: as historians, as sociologists, as anthropologists, as emergency managers, etc. But rather than just griping, I want to turn this critique from frustration to possibility. With this journal, I hope that we can succeed in building an authentically interdisciplinary space—a place where we’re not just citing the same scholars from our own fields but actually engaging with scholars from across a wide range of disciplines (and ideally practitioners as well). The more that we can push disaster studies scholars to embrace the diverse methodological contributions, theoretical contributions, and intellectual contributions that come out of multiple fields, the more effective we can be in interpreting disaster. Disasters are complex processes, and if we hope to understand and grapple with these very complex problems, we must approach them from multiple angles, perspectives, and vantage points. I hope that our journal can be a place to do just this.

ksenia chmutina Thank you. I think we don’t discuss the question of ethics enough. Monica, you’ve alluded to this quite a lot in your story when you were sharing it earlier. So I was wondering: what do you see as the key ethical challenge in disaster research?

monica sanders I think one of the key challenges is that we are studying something that is complicated, and should be both inter- and transdisciplinary in nature; each one of those disciplines brings their own concept of what is and what is not ethical to bear. We all come from different institutions and have very different ethical foundations. For example, mine infuses Catholic social thought with what we consider to be standard research ethics. And that can sometimes be complicated. We’ve got some people out there that are doing important and daring work right? We have the manifesto—the Radix manifesto—that gives us some baseline principles. Many of us accept the current thinking about “no natural disasters.” That is a principle that could be developed into ethical guidelines, and we can serve as a community of advocates for that.

I think what we have is a patchwork of concepts, none of which are superior to the other. I still ask: what are some baseline ethical approaches that we can take in this work to make sure that we are doing what we intend to do, which is to grow this field, and be a better service to the people who are experiencing these events?

sulfikar amir I see the scholarship as having two categories. There are scholars who are very loyal to one specific field, and they spend the rest of their life doing something related to the field. But there is also another group of scholars who continue traveling from one place to another. So for them scholarship is more like a journey; this includes not only the field but also the method, the approach, and so on. And I think for the second category, they will have the opportunity to contribute to this journal. We can know disaster in a highly mathematical way. There’s also pure history and philosophy, so the spectrum is very broad. You can know disaster from different angles, as many of you have already said, and I completely agree. You know this is a very complex phenomenon. It is a process, it is a concept. But also it is a structure. It has multiple layers and interactions.

jen henderson Even the conversation we’re having illustrates the beauty and possibility of having different perspectives, methods, theoretical frameworks, and experiences brought to bear on the concept of disaster. How do we imagine that it might be (re)shaped by the journal as a community of practice? It is an interesting challenge to the notion of interdisciplinarity, which can seem inclusive and richly complex but, in practice, can feel exclusive. One of the things I think may be a challenge for us is our thinking about interdisciplinarity as a core value of the journal. It centers the academy and scholarship and risks devaluing the thinking and writing of practitioners and others who may not engage with disciplinary knowledge as their primary way of understanding the world. So I think we want to engage with disasters in terms that are broader than the concept of interdisciplinarity. We want this multitude of voices that come together from both academic and nonacademic spaces. Even as I articulate this binary, it privileges the academic . . . so I struggle to think outside my own training. But I think that’s part of the challenge, the tension that makes this work so exciting: how to be inclusive in our thinking and writing. This is where I see us heading.

ksenia chmutina “Postdisciplinary” is the word I’ve heard recently. We have different understandings of disaster scholarship, and I guess this is why this journal has been so much fun to launch, because we are bringing all this together, and it’s a weird and wonderful mix. To wrap up the conversation today, I want us all to think for a second about our biggest hopes for this journal. For me personally, my biggest hope is for our early career researchers. I see more and more of these very curious scholars who are really challenging normative disaster scholarship. They’re really not scared to resist the status quo. I feel that with this journal we must provide a platform that would help amplify these early career researchers’ voices and support them.

jacob remes There has not yet been a venue where there are book reviews of, by, and for disaster scholars. But there are about 100 scholarly books that come out each year that touch on disaster studies—and that’s just the books in English! So my biggest hope is that we will become that venue of debate and review of book-length disaster scholarship from around the world and from lots of different disciplines and fields.

julia irwin I envision this journal as being truly global in scope, and really hope we can accomplish this. I want to publish work from all continents and in multiple languages, and really bring these conversations together in one publishing venue. As I alluded to earlier, I’m also very excited about the prospect of having conversations that cross all sorts of borders—disciplinary, national, methodological, you name it. That said, I think one of our greatest challenges as an editorial collective has been to figure out how to accomplish these goals most effectively. We all want to take a very broad view of how we define disaster, what counts as disaster, and what disaster studies (as a field) includes and encompasses. But at some point, we recognize that we have to have some boundaries, some limitations on what we can include in the journal. I think that within the first few issues, we will start to see this become clearer—that we’ll see the rich, interdisciplinary field we are envisioning begin to take a more definitive shape. I’m truly excited to see where we go, and eager to work with my fellow editors and our contributors as we build up the field of critical disaster studies.

kim fortun I have high ambitions that JDS can be part of the remaking of the university writ large, being foundationally transnational, diverse in its modes of expression and reaching diverse audiences. JDS can help link academic researchers across disciplines and geography; it also can build bridges between researchers and practitioners, between researchers and the communities they study, and between research and teaching. This means that we need to benchmark and evaluate JDS in ways that skirt conventional academic metrics, recognizing that these metrics won’t get us where we want to go.

ksenia chmutina Also, what about our commitment to being open access?

jacob remes One of our earliest commitments has been to be what is called “platinum open access,” which means both free to read and free to publish. We want to be inclusive of all readers—even those without access to academic libraries and their shrinking periodical budgets—and we want to be open to researchers regardless of institutional affiliation or access to grant money. But this creates a problem: if you don’t have money coming in from readers, and you don’t have money coming in from authors, then you don’t have money coming in at all. This goes back to Kim’s point about being part of a new agenda for different types of scholarship, different metrics, and different ways of thinking about the academic enterprise. Once you commit to being free to read and free to publish in, you are necessarily on the forefront of rethinking how the academy, and especially scholarly communication, works. How does one fund the journal—all of the work that needs to be done to get this conversation from being a conversation that we all are having on Zoom onto the copyedited, professionally designed, permanently web-hosted pages that our readers are going to be reading it on? That requires work, and it requires money. Who is going to do that work and where that money is going to come from are going to be two of the main challenges for us and for scholars in every other discipline and field going forward as we try to save and remake the academy.

jen henderson My hope is that we could be a site that integrates practitioners more into our space and thinking about modes of expression. I love that we can help inform but also reflect what’s happening in our public safety, official spaces, and our decision maker spaces, but also invite them to participate in meaningful ways. Because I work with these groups so closely, I know that they have so much to say and contribute. But it’s unclear how that would happen. So I guess the biggest challenge for me is thinking about how we create the infrastructure and the sort of rubric that allows us to see their work in our journal. How do we envision their writing? How do we envision their expression? What does that look like? And how does that translate into meaningful contributions for them, too?

rodolfo hernandez I will reiterate my view on this truly multilingual effort. It will take some time, and we’ve been discovering that most of the platforms are not ready for that effort. Probably the data management side is worth mentioning, it could be a very interesting space for the whole discipline, and even as an example of how to archive some of the most complex issues of disaster. Sometimes we think about the topic and less about the victims. Sometimes information is needed for decision makers and first responders. It will be a challenge. Probably as we build this project, it might be more common to see how we can also shape the data management side.

sulfikar amir Well, a simple hope that I have is that the journal will be highly respected by the disaster research community and in other academic communities. This should not become only an outlet for publication; it should become a sort of inclusive platform that links practitioners, policy makers, students, and academics to talk about disaster from different perspectives. And of course, by bringing in a multilingual dimension.

scott gabriel knowles I’d be satisfied if in ten years’ time the word “disaster” wasn’t treated with the reverence and mystery it conjures today in policy circles. A disaster isn’t separate from war, from injustice, from capitalism—everyday life is a process of making and recovering from harm. Let’s demystify it. This journal can’t do all of that, I guess, but why not try?