Project MUSE®: Journal of Disaster Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Disaster Studies.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2024) through current issue
Latest Articles: Journal of Disaster StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Disaster Studies2834-457XLatest articles in Journal of Disaster Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor's Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984816
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One of the earliest and most central goals of the Journal of Disaster Studies is to be a venue to build, apply, and elaborate theory into the field of disaster studies. Theory—particularly the critical theory that developed from European humanists in the second half of the twentieth century—can be intimidating. But at its heart, theory is "congealed experience," as historian David Austin writes; it is how we, as scholars and as people in the world, bring together disparate phenomena, sort them into categories, and develop causal explanations that transcend individual experiences or events.1 The first two research articles in this issue offer examples of what disaster studies scholars stand to gain from engaging in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallEditor's Introduction2026-03-12text/htmlen-USEditor's Introduction2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®91272026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Where's the Disaster in Disaster Studies? Temporal and Spatial Complexities in Assessing Impact
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984817
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To a casual observer, disasters are ubiquitous and something of the past, present, and future. Deaths, injuries, mass displacement, damage to housing and capital goods, and aggregate economic destruction are seemingly straightforward indicators we could foreground to signify measurable effects of a disaster. It might seem strange, then, that scholars across disciplines often disagree on how to define them, and historians tend to complicate things further. Indeed, what we consider to be disastrous today was not necessarily considered disastrous by past societies, and we should be cautious with our preconceptions as to what features or characteristics make up past societal resilience and adaptation—two key concepts
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallWhere's the Disaster in Disaster Studies? Temporal and Spatial Complexities in Assessing Impact2026-03-12text/htmlen-USWhere's the Disaster in Disaster Studies? Temporal and Spatial Complexities in Assessing Impact2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1670622026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Turning Disaster into a Path for Development: Francoist Spain's Humanitarian Response to the 1960 Great Chilean Earthquake
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984818
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On 22 May 1960, an earthquake measuring 9.5 on the Richter scale struck southern Chile. The epicentre was 144 km northeast of Valdivia, in the region of Los Ríos, 800 km south of Santiago. It remains the most powerful earthquake ever registered by seismographers. A few months after the earthquake, the Spanish embassy in Santiago informed the minister of Foreign Affairs, Fernando María Castiella, that the Chilean government had accepted the donation of four sets of postage stamps by Spain as a contribution to the reconstruction effort. The tone of his letter is enthusiastic: "Several countries offered to issue stamps for Chile. The Spanish initiative was preferred … The high political and sentimental value of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallTurning Disaster into a Path for Development: Francoist Spain's Humanitarian Response to the 1960 Great Chilean Earthquake2026-03-12text/htmlen-USTurning Disaster into a Path for Development: Francoist Spain's Humanitarian Response to the 1960 Great Chilean Earthquake2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1396812026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Household Preparedness for Food Access Changes After Cyclone Idai
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984819
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The frequency and intensity of climate-related extreme weather disasters have increased globally, posing significant challenges to household food access, especially during and after disasters. Storms and floods were the most common between 2000 and 2019; the number of storms increased from 1,457 to 2,034, and major floods more than doubled from 1,389 to 3,254 (UNDRR 2021). Of these events, extreme flooding, rainfall, thunderstorms, and tropical cyclones can immediately disrupt food systems and household entitlements that underpin food availability, access, stability, and utilization (IFRC 2020; FAO 2021). Some of the most catastrophic postdisaster environments are characterized by widespread destruction of food
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallHousehold Preparedness for Food Access Changes After Cyclone Idai2026-03-12text/htmlen-USHousehold Preparedness for Food Access Changes After Cyclone Idai2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1620652026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12On Challenges and Opportunities to Meet the Ethos of the Disaster Studies Manifesto: A Conversation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984820
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In May 2019, a collective of twenty-five scholars came together to publish the "Power, Prestige & Forgotten Values: A Disaster Studies Manifesto"1 This initiative was prompted by both frustration and hope. Many of the signatories have felt frustrated with the concepts, frameworks, methodologies and tools they have used throughout their careers as researchers and, for some of them, practitioners. Many of these concepts, frameworks, methodologies and tools, which have been normalised in the academic literature, are unable to capture and mirror the everyday experiences, values, and beliefs of local people in many regions of the world. In parallel, the signatories of the manifesto were encouraged and inspired by an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallOn Challenges and Opportunities to Meet the Ethos of the Disaster Studies Manifesto: A Conversation2026-03-12text/htmlen-USOn Challenges and Opportunities to Meet the Ethos of the Disaster Studies Manifesto: A Conversation2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®665592026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Acts of Aid: Politics of Relief and Reconstruction in the 1934 Bihar-Nepal Earthquake by Eleonor Marcussen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984821
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Acts of Aid explores the political impact of colonial Government of India and Indian civil society responses to a powerful earthquake in northern India and Nepal in 1934. The book derives from Eleonor Marcussen's dissertation in South Asian history. Marcussen uses archival research to explore the policies and perspectives of officials in government and activists in the Indian National Congress (INC). The book helps explain the political impact of the disaster and provides political explanations for choices made in relief and reconstruction. Crucially, Marcussen places detailed historical evidence in dialogue with contemporary critical disaster studies, thereby broadening the reach of the book beyond South Asian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallActs of Aid: Politics of Relief and Reconstruction in the 1934 Bihar-Nepal Earthquake by Eleonor Marcussen (review)2026-03-12text/htmlen-USActs of Aid: Politics of Relief and Reconstruction in the 1934 Bihar-Nepal Earthquake by Eleonor Marcussen (review)2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®76322026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert by Sunaura Taylor (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984822
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Disabled Ecologies is a brilliant speculative work from an emergent literature deeply shaped by queerness, decoloniality, and disability. For anyone involved in disability justice work in the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a particular yearning this text feeds—for wide-ranging conversations foregrounding disability, written in the comfort of disability justice aesthetics. Although the book does not fully manifest the richness of its provocations, its masterful staging of a long-desired conversation on disability and environmentalism makes it an excellent contribution to critical disaster studies, political ecology, environmental anthropology, and critical disability studies.The primary argument in Disabled Ecologies
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallDisabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert by Sunaura Taylor (review)2026-03-12text/htmlen-USDisabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert by Sunaura Taylor (review)2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®95252026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet by On Barak (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984823
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On Barak's Heat, a History implores us to turn to the past to find solutions for a sustainable future. A heating climate poses existential threats, yet efforts to cope with the heat through the twentieth century have only exacerbated the problem. Worse, he claims, the tendency of the sciences and the humanities to what he calls "methodological planetarism" (15) has led to a regrettable hyperopia that blinds us to the immediacy of the local in our "extraterrestrial" and "future-oriented" (4) attention to the global. For Barak, global warming, with its obsessions with averages over large scales, is dangerously "disengaged" (6) in a way that precludes attention to the localized specificity of heat's dangers. The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallHeat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet by On Barak (review)2026-03-12text/htmlen-USHeat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet by On Barak (review)2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®178672026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12The Barrack 1572–1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture by Robert Jan van Pelt (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984824
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Robert Jan van Pelt states in the introduction to this book that "the history of the barrack is anchored in historic intervals when seemingly dormant energies in society or nature suddenly awaken" (20). This claim is evidenced throughout the following chapters, with examples the use of these simple, easy-to-construct buildings as military housing, expeditionary encampments, emergency shelters, and prison camps. Barracks, van Pelt argues with great success, should be seen as far more than just a "simple, inexpensive hut" (114). They represent great moments of change in people's lives and, particularly in the historic period covered, are powerful symbols of adaptability and innovation in times of crisis.In a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallThe Barrack 1572–1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture by Robert Jan van Pelt (review)2026-03-12text/htmlen-USThe Barrack 1572–1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture by Robert Jan van Pelt (review)2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®78272026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Ocean Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe by Gerard Toal (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984825
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Geopolitics is embedded into modern capitalist political economy and various power networks, including those contributing to climate change and its related issues. Therefore, questions arise about the role of geopolitics in shaping the world and the planet up to this point of climate crisis and its potential—epistemological and empirical—in supporting or understanding of this climate crisis. Gerard Toal's Ocean Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe is an excursus into the intricate and contradictory relationships existing between geopolitics and the current climate crisis. Toal interrogates geopolitics and its territorial practices that for centuries have been expressions of capitalist
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallOcean Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe by Gerard Toal (review)2026-03-12text/htmlen-USOcean Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe by Gerard Toal (review)2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®92922026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan by Kerry Smith (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984826
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Sitting at the convergence of several active tectonic plates, Japan's existence is inextricably linked to earthquakes. As the country with the highest frequency of strong earthquakes in the world, its scientists have long pursued the chimera of predicting "the next big one." Although this goal remains elusive, the quest and its human drama have profoundly shaped the scientific community and society at large, driving major developments in science and policy throughout the twentieth century.Kerry Smith's Predicting Disasters masterfully documents this complex narrative. His deep knowledge of Japan and the Japanese language, combined with exceptional storytelling skills, creates a vibrant account of the intertwined
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallPredicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan by Kerry Smith (review)2026-03-12text/htmlen-USPredicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan by Kerry Smith (review)2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®67422026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Miami in the Anthropocene: Rising Seas and Urban Resilience by Stephanie Wakefield (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984827
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As someone whose earliest impressions of Miami came not from policy reports or travel but through the saturated opening scenes of Dexter, TV show that framed the city as a sunlit playground of beauty and menace, Stephanie Wakefield's Miami in the Anthropocene delivered a necessary disruption. The series once made me think of Miami as a city suspended between glitter and decay. Wakefield's analysis, drawing from multimodal methods including on-the-ground observations and document-based inquiry, deepens that image into a portrait of urban resilience, spatial politics, and infrastructural imagination in an age of planetary crisis. Framed as an overture toward an "Anthropocene critical urban theory/practice," Wakefield
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallMiami in the Anthropocene: Rising Seas and Urban Resilience by Stephanie Wakefield (review)2026-03-12text/htmlen-USMiami in the Anthropocene: Rising Seas and Urban Resilience by Stephanie Wakefield (review)2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®87942026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12La buona educazione degli oppressi: Piccola storia del decoro by Wolf Bukowski (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984828
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I regret not reading Wolf Bukowski sooner, and I am even more sorry that this powerful little book has not yet been translated into English. The title—The Good Education of the Oppressed: A Brief History of Decency—cleverly plays on the hegemonic, top-down schooling process disguised as pedagogy but ends up as a bitter critique, jokes aside, of neoliberal discourses in urban spaces.The book opens with the brutal murder of Idy Diene, a Senegalese street vendor shot in Florence in 2018. The failure to recognise the tragedy's racist underpinnings led the Senegalese community to protest, and some public flowerpots got broken. This unforgivable disorder (breaking flowerpots) shifted the mainstream narrative from the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallLa buona educazione degli oppressi: Piccola storia del decoro by Wolf Bukowski (review)2026-03-12text/htmlen-USLa buona educazione degli oppressi: Piccola storia del decoro by Wolf Bukowski (review)2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®85772026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12A Destituent Gesture for Disaster Studies: Minor Language and Lateral Agency as a Form of Critique
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984907
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This article is a speculative attempt to present an "outside" exercise, engaging with the ideas prominent in disaster from the outside of disaster studies.1 Outside is that place where, according to Deleuze (2000), creative thinking can emerge. It is certainly chaotic, constantly becoming and populated by monsters and heterogeneous dimensions. Every discipline defines its operation in relation to an outside, an "other than itself" that it can never fully subsume and exhaust, but from which the external challenge compels it to think about, and the speculation I suggest for disaster studies is to engage with the outside of its pragmatism, linearity, and simplification, beyond the process of fixation to which every
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallA Destituent Gesture for Disaster Studies: Minor Language and Lateral Agency as a Form of Critique2026-03-12text/htmlen-USA Destituent Gesture for Disaster Studies: Minor Language and Lateral Agency as a Form of Critique2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1606462026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12Climate Vulnerability as a Sociopolitical Construct: A Study on Asylum Seekers in Greece
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984908
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In summer 2023, Southern Europe experienced an unprecedented heat wave, with temperatures soaring above 45°C. In Greece, Spain, and Italy, these scorching conditions, coupled with powerful winds, led to a surge in wildfires. Several Greek islands battled wildfires, which led to the large-scale evacuation of residents and tourists and destruction of nature, wildlife, housing, and hotels (Smith 2023). Greece is also host to a large fluctuating share of asylum seekers, the majority of whom arrive and are hosted on the Greek islands. An estimated 34,006 people arrived by sea on the Greek islands in 2023 (up to November 12; UNHCR 2023a). Although there is limited information on the climatic conditions for asylum seekers
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/886/image/coversmallClimate Vulnerability as a Sociopolitical Construct: A Study on Asylum Seekers in Greece2026-03-12text/htmlen-USClimate Vulnerability as a Sociopolitical Construct: A Study on Asylum Seekers in Greece2026-03-122026TWOProject MUSE®1589002026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-12