Disasters: Deconstructed Podcast

In this episode we welcome anthropologist Raja Swamy (University of Tennessee), author of Capitalism and Catastrophe. Swamy argues that “disaster” is flexible and is often misframed as a discrete event rather than a long process, urging disaster studies to interrogate the boundary between disaster and “normal” conditions. He emphasizes how pre-disaster struggles—poverty, eviction, austerity, displacement, war—shape impacts and recovery, and uses Marxism to foreground capitalism’s role in producing vulnerability and enabling “disaster capitalism.” Addressing critiques of Eurocentrism, he contends that modernity and Marxism have global, anti-colonial histories. He highlights resistance and solidarity through examples including Rana Plaza, Hurricane Katrina, Puerto Rico, and Gaza, and calls for politicized, movement-aligned scholarship that rejects false neutrality.

We open Season 11 of Disasters Deconstructed, with Ksenia and Jason explaining the season’s focus on the politics of disasters and outlining a split release schedule (five episodes over the next two months, a summer break, then six episodes from late September, with a possible Christmas special).

They briefly reflect on Season 10’s link to the forthcoming edited volume Contemplating Catastrophe, currently in review. We welcome returning guest Ricardo Fuentealba, assistant professor at Universidad de O’Higgins in Chile, whose work addresses socio-spatial inequality, disaster governance, environmental conflict, and political economy.

Ricardo argues that calling something a disaster, crisis, or emergency is not neutral, that disasters reveal power relations and inequality, and that the concept is useful if critically reflected upon. He discusses bringing urban political ecology into disaster studies to connect global political economy to situated, spatially produced processes, offering Chile-based examples involving flood-related labor precarity tied to food systems and the water demands of AI data centers.

The conversation also debates the politics of academic canons and citation practices, language and “objectivity” in scholarship, strategies for integrating politics into disaster research under risk, and the role of reading beyond one’s field and collaborating across generations; the episode closes by previewing a June 1 discussion on capitalism and catastrophe.

Episode overview

The Season 10 finale welcomes disaster anthropologist Susanna Hoffman, who wrote the preface to the hosts' forthcoming edited volume, Contemplating Catastrophe. Drawing on a career spanning cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and literature, the episode reflects on the depth of culture in disaster studies, the limits of narrow disciplinary silos, and what the field needs to move from fragmented case studies toward broader theoretical and policy impact.

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Episode 10 continues the season's regional focus with a conversation grounded in India and the wider Global South, bringing together a scholar of gender, trauma, and displacement and a development researcher working across climate change, migration, and disasters. The episode explores how literature, capability theory, and self-reflective practice reshape how disaster scholars understand resistance, complicity, and care.

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Episode 9 turns to South and Southeast Asia, bringing together an early-career gender and disaster risk scholar and a senior interdisciplinary disaster governance scientist. Drawing on postcolonial theory, hybridity, and the politics of knowledge production, the episode examines how colonial legacies continue to structure vulnerability, gender exclusion, and state power in the region — and how discourse itself becomes a tool of both domination and resistance.

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Hosts

Jason von Meding

Ksenia Chmutina

Guests

Jake Cadag — Assistant Professor, University of the Philippines; scholar of community participation, postcolonial disaster studies, and grassroots disaster risk reduction

Caroline Contillo — disaster researcher, resilience trainer, and disaster mental health practitioner; lead trainer with the New York Office of Mental Health

Key themes

Postcolonial and Indigenous ways of knowing disasters

Disaster, authoritarianism, and political repression

Activism, scholarship, and public sociology

Buddhism, interdependence, and socially engaged practice

Mutual aid, disaster mental health, and collective recovery

Disaster risk creation through development and infrastructure

Moving beyond reformism toward structural change

Core discussion highlights

Jake Cadag reflects on rediscovering Filipino-language scholarship and postcolonial social science, emphasizing reclamation rather than rejection of global knowledge.

Disaster is framed as inseparable from political economy, authoritarian governance, and long-standing systems of marginalization in the Philippines.

Jake discusses Walden Bello as a public sociologist whose work connects development, dictatorship, and disaster risk creation, and whose activism illustrates the risks scholars face under repressive regimes.

The conversation highlights how political persecution and “red-tagging” of NGOs and academics can depoliticize disaster risk reduction and weaken grassroots participation.

Caroline Contillo introduces Thích Nhất Hạnh as a thinker whose concept of interbeing challenges the idea of detached, objective disaster research.

Socially engaged Buddhism is discussed as a framework for witnessing suffering without withdrawal—and for allowing compassionate action to emerge from that witnessing.

Mutual aid and disaster mental health are explored through relational perspectives, including interpersonal neurobiology and community-based recovery.

The episode challenges “bounce back” versions of resilience, arguing instead for recovery that confronts structural violence, inequality, and capitalism.

Both guests emphasize that disasters reveal deeper systemic failures—and that meaningful recovery requires political engagement, not neutrality.

Episode overview

Hosts

Jason von Meding

Ksenia Chmutina

Guests

Chris Gomez — Professor at Kobe University; head of the Sabo Laboratory; scholar of sediment-related hazards, ethical disaster management, and interdisciplinary disaster research

Wes Cheek — Assistant Professor of Emergency Management, Massachusetts Maritime Academy; scholar of community, post-disaster reconstruction, and urban theory

Key themes

Japan as a site of rich but underexplored disaster thinking

Reading beyond disaster studies: political theory, history, anarchism, and Marxism

Social contracts, sovereignty, and disaster as rupture

Infrastructure, concrete, and the political economy of risk

Radical alternatives in Japanese history

Disaster, authoritarianism, and state violence

Hope, resistance, and refusal in dark times

Core discussion highlights

Chris Gomez reflects on returning to classic political theory, particularly Hobbes, to rethink disaster as a breaking point in the social contract between the state and communities.

The discussion situates Japan’s long reliance on concrete-heavy disaster infrastructure within broader histories of governance, economic stability, and political legitimacy.

Chris introduces Masao Akagi, often described as the “father of Sabo,” emphasizing how engineering practice, drawings, and material interventions function as forms of knowledge alongside academic texts.

The episode challenges narrow definitions of scholarship, arguing that disaster knowledge is produced through multiple modalities, not only words and citations.

Wes Cheek discusses Ōsugi Sakae as a key figure of Japan’s Taishō period, highlighting a moment when alternative political futures—anarchist, socialist, anti-authoritarian—were still possible.

The conversation explores how the Great Kantō Earthquake was used as cover for state violence, repression, and the targeting of leftists and ethnic Koreans.

Marxism is discussed as a crucial starting point for disaster scholarship, particularly for understanding vulnerability, power, and the non-natural origins of inequality.

Both guests reflect on contemporary Japan, including demographic decline, economic contraction, tourism, immigration, and the rise of nationalist and exclusionary politics.

Disasters are framed not only as physical events but as moments that expose deeper social fractures, discrimination, and political choices.

Episode overview

Hosts

Jason von Meding

Ksenia Chmutina

Guests

Giovanni Gugg — cultural anthropologist and lecturer in urban anthropology, working on risk cultures, disaster response, and activism in vulnerable urban territories

Anna Süsina — Lecturer in Media and Creative Industries, Loughborough University; scholar of communication, social change, participatory media, and power asymmetries

Victor Marchezini — sociologist at the Brazilian Early Warning Center and professor at INPE; leading voice in the sociology of disasters in Brazil

Key themes

Latin American and Indigenous intellectual traditions in disaster studies

Reading beyond English-language and Eurocentric canons

Development, coloniality, and the production of vulnerability

Plural futures, pluriverses, and alternative ontologies

Dialogue, pedagogy, and critical hope

Translation, language, and epistemic justice

Activism, civic responsibility, and scholarship

Core discussion highlights

Guests reflect on their reading practices, emphasizing podcasts, oral traditions, hard-copy books, and texts emerging from social movements, Indigenous communities, and Latin American critical scholarship.

Victor Marchezini discusses the influence of Paulo Freire, highlighting dialogue, pedagogy, oppression in everyday life, and the importance of critical hope in teaching, research, and disaster practice.

Giovanni explores Arturo Escobar’s critique of development and his concept of the pluriverse, applying it to disaster risk and urbanization around Mount Vesuvius. Disaster planning is framed as a cultural and political process, not only a technical one.

Anna Süsina reflects on Indigenous thinking through Ailton Krenak, emphasizing relational worldviews, the human–non-human relationship, and the idea that the dominant relationship with Earth is itself a disaster.

The conversation challenges the asymmetry between “scientific” and Indigenous knowledge, arguing for equal legitimacy and meaningful translation rather than extraction or tokenism.

Translation is discussed as both a political challenge and a creative possibility—across languages, disciplines, generations, and even between humans and non-humans.

The guests collectively stress the dangers of time compression in disaster scholarship, where urgency crowds out long-term thinking, historical analysis, and ethical engagement.

Episode overview

Hosts

Jason von Meding

Ksenia Chmutina

Guests

Danielle Rivera — Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley; scholar of environmental and climate justice working with rural and unincorporated marginalized communities

Dewald van Niekerk — Professor at North-West University (South Africa); founder and editor-in-chief of Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies; leading scholar of disaster risk in Southern Africa

Key themes

Black scholarship as central—not peripheral—to disaster studies

Structural racism, historicity, and the “disaster before the disaster”

Community resistance, agency, and epistemologies of survival

Ubuntu, mutual support, and collective responsibility

Rejecting colorblind and event-focused disaster narratives

Long-term engagement versus extractive disaster research

Bridging scholarship, practice, and policy

Core discussion highlights

Danielle Rivera discusses Clyde Woods’ work on the Mississippi Delta, emphasizing the importance of deep, place-based scholarship that traces disasters through long histories of structural racism, political economy, and resistance.

Woods’ concept of “the disaster before the disaster” is explored as a way of understanding disasters as outcomes of deliberate abandonment and plantation logics rather than isolated failures or surprises.

The conversation challenges dominant disaster narratives that center elite losses while marginalizing the experiences of poorer and racialized communities.

Dewald van Niekerk reflects on his engagement with Black Consciousness thought and the work of Mamphela Ramphele, highlighting kindness, dignity, and community as starting points for resilience.

Ubuntu is discussed as a philosophy emphasizing interdependence, shared humanity, and collective problem-solving—offering important lessons for disaster risk reduction and recovery.

Both guests critique paternalistic and technocratic approaches to disaster management, arguing for community-led, non-extractive, and context-sensitive engagement.

The episode reflects on the evolution of disaster studies, calling for deeper interdisciplinarity, stronger links between theory and practice, and greater honesty about power, inequality, and history.

Episode overview

Hosts

Jason von Meding

Ksenia Chmutina

Guests

Ruth Kinna — professor of political theory and historian of ideas, specialist in anarchism, utopianism, and activism

Alex Christoyannopoulos — reader in Politics and International Relations, specialist in anarcho-pacifism, Tolstoy, and religious anarchism

Key themes

Anarchism as a political and ethical framework for disaster thinking

Mutual aid as solidarity, not service delivery

Violence, nonviolence, and the role of the state in producing harm

Bottom-up governance, trust, and community agency

Climate change, adaptation, and early anarchist thought

Appropriation of radical ideas by states and institutions

Resilience, care, and the politics of responsibility

Core discussion highlights

Ruth Kinna discusses Peter Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid and its relevance to disasters, emphasizing cooperation, interdependence, and locally rooted knowledge.

The conversation reframes disasters as moments that expose existing power relations, where mutual aid often outperforms slow or absent state responses—especially in marginalized communities.

Kropotkin’s early engagement with environmental change and food security is explored, highlighting his concern with climate, production, migration, and adaptation well before contemporary climate discourse.

Alex Christoyannopoulos reflects on Leo Tolstoy’s anarcho-pacifism, focusing on violence as a structural feature of the state and on moral responsibility, complicity, and refusal.

Nonviolence is discussed not only as a moral stance but as a practical foundation for community resilience, collective decision-making, and resistance.

Both guests critique the appropriation of concepts like mutual aid, care, and resilience by governments and institutions, arguing that such moves often strip these ideas of their political substance.

The episode challenges disaster scholars to take seriously activism, disobedience, and bottom-up organizing as central—rather than peripheral—to disaster risk and response.