Critical Disaster Studies (ISSN 2689-4750) is the flagship journal of the Disasters, Displacement, & Human Rights Program in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Aims and Scope
Critical Disaster Studies features full length peer-reviewed academic papers that address the problem of disasters from critical perspectives. Through its offerings, CDS seeks to explore and outline the contours of a critically grounded anthropological approach to the study of disasters. Scholarship under the broad rubric of disaster studies has moved over the last few years beyond examining the interplay of natural hazards and human social conditions in shaping disasters, into new terrains examining linkages and continuities via frameworks such as vulnerability, resilience, risk and adaptation. Some recent studies foreground the workings of neoliberalism in the production of vulnerability, while others focus attention on the continuities of racial, class and gender inequalities in placing historically marginalized populations at the receiving end of both disasters as well as strategies of recovery.
Papers in CDS will seek to deepen this analysis by bringing into the analytical framework of disaster studies several related bodies of knowledge: the broad social scientific literature on climate science and its insights into the planetary ecological effects of anthropogenic activities, studies that examine the manner in which contemporary capitalism, untethered from nominal public controls since the advent of neoliberalism, reorganizes populations, resources and environments in relationships that exacerbate ecological vulnerabilities while substantially removing from public purview and control priorities vital to life and well-being, and studies that foreground and engage with the continuities of historic patterns of structural violence along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In doing so we seek to promote critical inquiry into the complex interplay of structures and processes tied to the continuities and disjunctures characterizing colonial and neocolonial relationships, the legacies and shifting contours of underdevelopment, and the problems and prospects for a politics of resistance in the contested terrains that are disaster outcomes.
Keywords
disasters, displacement, human rights, social justice, environmental justice, climate change, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, race, structural violence, war, violence, political economy, political ecology, dispossession, journal, anthropology, DDHR
Frequency: Critical Disaster Studies is a biannual journal, with one issue published in January and one in June. Our inaugural issue is expected in June 2021.
