Geographies and Disasters: Places, Processes, and the Human Geographical Imagination

(Hardback)

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Drawing on global case studies, this is the first book to outline and elaborate on the ways that human geography has extended our understanding of disasters.

This volume explores the unique, creative, and critical ways human geography makes sense of disasters. Every chapter analyses disasters through the lens of a different theoretical framework common to geography, including assemblage theory, post-colonialism, urban political ecology, governmentality, affect theory and scale. The case studies in the collection range from hurricane risk in the Caribbean and volcano eruptions in Chile to floods in India and many more. Each chapter conceives of disasters as process rather than individual events. Disasters are conceptualized as always-already entangled in the continual making and remaking of collective life.
The chapters present a pluriversal perspective that mirrors geographys methodological sensitivity to how disasters are shaped by the in-situ conditions in which they unfold. The volume both clarifies, and stays attuned to, the multiple, often cross-cutting, spatial and temporal registers upon which disasters are experienced. Each chapter also expands upon geographys appreciation for the materiality of disasters. Here, disasters are thought to arise from, but also actively contribute to, the material configuration and reconfiguration of space over time. This concern with materiality allows chapters to address the ways that politics is engrained into disasters. Providing inspiration for future scholars in geography and further afield, the collection is essential reading for those interested in developing more advanced understandings of disasters.

Author Bio

Nathaniel OGrady is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Disaster at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom.

Gemma Sou is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Monash University, Australia.