It’s been a busy few weeks here at the Rural Rivers project! Students in Dr. Boke’s Anthropology of Disaster class have been hard at work with their community partners, determining what will be the most useful work they can do to support disaster planning, mitigation, and recovery. From mapping culverts in Ludlow, to examining erosion in West Hartford, to revitalizing a floodplain’s vegetation in Cavendish, to collaborating with Vermont Emergency Management on stakeholder outreach for hazard mitigation planning, students are connecting with many different ways of working on and understanding disasters.
These students, as well as community members and visiting scholars came together to offer the first annual Disaster Justice Symposium, facilitated by Dr. Boke and Holly Sullivan (Rural Rivers Research Assistant). With 67 people in attendance on Zoom and in person, joining from California, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Vermont, New Hampshire, and many other places, we had such a rich and interesting discussion about the directions of disaster justice!
In opening remarks, Dr. Boke shared the following – a few grounding assumptions for the symposium as a whole.
- There is no such thing as a natural disaster. Disaster studies scholars have demonstrated, year after year, study after study, that a natural event like a hurricane, an earthquake, or a tsunami does not inherently create conditions of disaster. What creates “disaster” out of “natural event” are the social, political, economic, infrastructural, and affective realities of the place in which it occurs, when it occurs.
- We also know it to be true that the most marginalized people in any given social setting are disproportionately profoundly impacted by disaster conditions.
- Our third grounding assumption is that we must take a historically deep approach to understanding disasters. As such, we note that current conditions of settler colonialism as well as neoliberal forms of extractive colonial capitalism are at the root of most disaster conditions.
These are long-term problems. They will only have long term solutions, even though the moments during and after a calamity produce impossible urgency. In this space, we have a chance to bring together people with a variety of experiences and knowledge bases to think through what disaster justice means, what directions the phrase takes us in, and what possibilities and limits it may offer. We have a chance to take up big ideas together – like hazard, risk and vulnerability; response, recovery, and mitigation; affect and relational healing; time, space, and livable futures.
All of these are topics on which much has been said, written, documented, livestreamed, and suffered. For the Symposium in 2024, we were joined by 4 panelists who will guided us through some of their perspectives on the work of justice in/around disaster.
Our Panelists
Dr. Melissa Rosario lives, practices, and works in Boriké, otherwise known as Puerto Rico. They hold a doctorate in anthropology from Cornell University, and have been at work bringing together anthropological theory, healing practice, and Indigenous rematriation through their scholarship and their workshops for radical community wellbeing since 2017. They currently co-direct CEPA, the Center for Embodied Pedagogy in Action, with their partner Lau Pat Ra. From their website:
“CEPA is a project that designs and facilitates encounters rooted in practices to heal accumulated trauma from our being. It’s part of a movement of people working to transform their relationships and everyday life to co-create freedom, centering all marginalized peoples especially Puerto Rican women, gender nonconforming, trans, queer folx. To manifest a just future, we honor the wisdom of the earth and of our ancestors as we work to heal.”
In their discussion at the Symposium, Dr. Melissa Rosario highlighted the importance of slowing down, even when things feel urgent, to ground into the next right thing to do, and listening deeply to land and water as teachers – her new book, “Beyond Disaster: Building Collective Futures in Puerto Rico” is available for pre-order.
Dr. Roberto Barrios lives, practices, and works in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he is Professor of Anthropology and Doris Zemurray Stone Chair for Latin American Studies. His 2017 book, Governing Affect: Neoliberalism and Disaster Reconstruction,” is a foundational text in disaster studies, and certainly for our Anthroology of Disaster class. Dr. Barrios’ work, across multiple fieldwork locations, community collaborations, publications, exemplifies an expert ethnographic attention to what stories are told, whose stories are representable, what matters in those stories, and how those stories impact and are impacted by political, economic, infrastructural efforts in disaster recovery.
Dr. Barrios described for us his new project and emphasized the possibilities of transnational solidarities in the aftermath of/recovery from disaster. His attention to affect – that is, feeling that is pre-cognitive but not pre-social – and its role in disaster recovery settings brings together the frames of the “bounded individual” and the “social collective” – these two frames are often taken as mutually exclusive areas of scholarly examination, and Roberto demonstrates that they do not have to be and indeed, they should not be.
Mr. Noah Bezanson also spoke with us about his work on his Masters’ thesis, “Developing a New Interdisciplinary Model for Mapping Flood Impacts for Risk Mitigation”, at the Colorado School of Mines, where he is a student in Humanitarian Engineering and Sciences. Mr. Bezanson’s work brings careful attention to critical communications practices –that is, mapping of floodplains, floodways, and simply, where the water went. Funded by the Natural Hazards Center to complete a field study in summer 2023 with the Rural Rivers/Mapping for Resilience Project, Mr. Bezanson’s work addresses core issues of accessibility and accuracy of flood mapping, and raises important questions about who makes maps, and for whom.
Dr. Sarah Kelly described for us her work on water justice in Mapuche-Williche territory in Chile, as well as the mapping tool she and her students have built -which Rural Rivers continues to use – to check the health of culverts, ditches and drains in Vermont. She is a Lecturer and Research Associate in the Geography Department here at Dartmouth College, as well as the Program Manager for the Energy Justice Clinic at the Irving Institute of Energy and Society, and Associate Researcher, Andes Lab Sur, Universidad Austral de Chile. Sarah holds long-term research relationships with Mapuche-Williche communities in Chile, where she has investigated hydropower, cultural cartography, and Indigenous rights. In 2021, she co-founded the Energy Justice Clinic at Dartmouth College.
This event was made possible by the multiple community partnerships our team holds, which nourish the work – and by our institutional sponsors including the Rockefeller Center, the Ethics Institute, the Sustainability Office, and the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. Most importantly, the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact has served as a hub through which to coordinate not just this Symposium, but also the Anthropology of Disaster class, from which the questions and framings of the symposium grew. Dr. Bryan Duff and the rest of the Center for Social Impact do amazing work to connect students and classrooms with wider community efforts and needs.
