Solidarity in disaster scholarship
Disaster scholarship purportedly promotes disaster risk reduction and resist disaster risk creation, thus deeply engaging with transboundary existential risks, justice, and political power. Disaster scholarship is thus a commitment to humanity, and for it to become truly equitable and just, solidarity must lie at its heart.
In this paper we connect solidarity with knowledge production, and the implications of disaster scholarship as well as the relationships on which it is built. We offer a critique of the kind of research produced by neoliberal academic institutions and provocations for resistance through solidarity. We call on disaster scholars to use these prompts to reflect on their practice, research ethics and their commitment to other human beings, inside and outside of the academy.
Solidarity can help scholars avoid the saviourism, self-congratulation, and paternalism that are common in academia. Solidarity in disaster scholarship is a worthy endeavour precisely because it brings a concrete alternative vision of what resisting disaster risk creation through knowledge production could be, revealing in the process what needs to bend and what needs to break in order to make room for scholarship that is not yet here.
History
School
- Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Published in
DisastersVolume
49Issue
1Publisher
WileyVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The Author(s)Publisher statement
This is an Open Access article published by Wiley under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2024-08-12Publication date
2024-09-17Copyright date
2024ISSN
0361-3666eISSN
1467-7717Publisher version
Language
- en