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 con?versation 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