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- Convenors:
-
Martin Sökefeld
(LMU Munich)
Pascale Schild (University of Bern)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-D289
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This workshop explores unpredictable and ambivalent social and political consequences of post-disaster interventions by state and non-state institutions, pointing to how affected people appropriate the instruments and subjectivities of disaster governance for their own purposes in manifold ways.
Long Abstract:
Disasters bring about many interventions by state and non-state institutions to ensure the survival of affected people and to restore destroyed environments and disrupted communities. These interventions, as Tania Li and others argue with a Foucauldian view on practices of governing, seldom improve people's lives according to plan. Yet, they do have powerful effects. In post-disaster situations, they often involve new ways of interaction between governing institutions and affected people. Often people are forced to move away from their homes and to stay in camps or shelters. Confronted with instruments of disaster governance - rescue operations, relief packages, subsidies, household surveys, compensation lists and many others - people are targeted as beneficiaries in various ways, ranging from passive victims, whose basic needs have to be satisfied, to self-responsible stakeholders in reconstruction programs. The consequences of these instruments and subjectivities reach beyond intended effects, as people develop their own strategies of dealing with them. They appropriate disaster governance for their own purposes by tampering with lists, splitting households, forming alliances with relief agencies, or authoring discourses of victimhood. Thus, for instance, while subject positions as victims are affirmed and embraced, people acquire agency and often negotiate a new sense of entitlement towards governments and NGOs.
We invite contributions that analyse cases of appropriation of disaster governance from below, demonstrating unpredictable and ambivalent consequences of political interventions after disasters which may fail and cause conflicts but also provide opportunities for people to take care of their needs and negotiate power relations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how undocumented Latinx migrants have organized politically for the right to stay in post-Katrina New Orleans by framing their past labor in post-disaster rebuilding as a civic contribution that has earned them the right to remain in the city.
Paper long abstract:
Disasters often serve as the meeting point for multiple mobilities. Just as displacement characterizes certain populations, recovery can bring in new communities to fill depleted labor markets. Rather than running smoothly, however, reconstruction is itself stratified by racial inequalities, class disparities, and unequal allocation of resources. Drawing on dissertation research conducted in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, in this paper I examine how the failure of the levees and flooding of 80% of the city led to rebuilding characterized by a securitized neoliberal governance regime that reproduced already existing racial and class inequalities (Adams 2013). As largely working-class Black residents were displaced, a new labor pool of mostly undocumented Latinx migrants quickly filled the ranks of a post-disaster political economy in which labor law enforcement was largely suspended. As the post-disaster reconstruction phase passed, construction has remained a robust industry that attracts migrant labor. Paralleling this post-2005 era has been an aggressive deportation regime (De Genova and Peutz 2010) that has continued until now. I argue here that while the suspension of labor law enforcement and the heightening of immigration law prosecution have worked in tandem to subordinate the labor of vulnerable individuals, undocumented Latinx workers have responded by organizing politically and asserting their right to stay in the city they helped to rebuild. In so doing, these non-citizen citizens, as I call them, embrace new forms of "insurgent citizenships" (Holston 2009) that re-conceptualize past labor as a sacrifice and civic contribution that has earned them the right to stay.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the moral conflict experienced by members of a rural community during the processes of reparation and reconstruction installed after the collapse of a tailings dam in 2015, belonging to the mining company Samarco, owned by Vale and BHP Billiton, in Mariana - MG, Brazil.
Paper long abstract:
Within the processes of reparation and reconstruction installed after the Fundão dam disaster, the category of the "affected person" ("atingido") emerges as a designation for a social subject linked to an institutional arrangement, both of which are characterized by their exceptionality and transience. Through an ethnographic research conducted with displaced families from the rural neighborhood of Paracatu de Baixo that are temporarily dwelling in the municipal seat of Mariana, we sought to better understand the effects of the disaster and its governance according to their practices and perceptions. Delving into the everyday experiences of the women of the community helped unveil a series of ruptures and continuities in its social and political organization that were engendered by the destruction of its houses and the current provisional living arrangements. The house (casa), as a socio-spatial and moral category, is a heuristic tool for understanding the conflict between the institutional treatment of reparations and reconstruction and the peasant morality, the latter being characterized by care, reciprocity, hierarchy and hard work. From a micropolitical perspective, the processes entailing the singularization of the material and symbolic losses were prevented by the immediate establishment of a post-disaster governance structure responsible for transforming the notion of the "atingido" into a subjectivation and identity tied to benefits and dependency. In this context, displaced residents may negotiate subjectivities and modes of action, while remaining marginalized in the decision-making processes.
Paper short abstract:
With case studies on reconstruction after the 2005 earthquake in Pakistani-administrated Azad Kashmir I demonstrate how a shelter housing scheme and its procedures figured in peoples' daily struggles over social and political power relations and state-society boundaries in the city of Muzaffarabad.
Paper long abstract:
With case studies on reconstruction after the 2005 earthquake in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administrated Azad Kashmir, I demonstrate in this paper how a prefabricated housing scheme, carried out by state authorities, intertwined with local people's imaginations and contestations of the 'state'. Relating to social and political ideas and practices of 'home', 'entitlements' and 'corruption', families in Muzaffarabad used the shelter project as symbolic and material means in their struggles for reconstruction and over social and political power relations including state-society boundaries.
My paper draws on a Foucault-inspired anthropology of political intervention and government, arguing that disasters, because of the local and translocal state and non-state interventions for reconstruction they often entail, prompt us to explore what these interventions 'do' in people's lives - how reconstruction policies govern people and their practices, and how people undermine these policies and make them work towards their own social and political ends.
After the government of Azad Kashmir announced that families whose houses had collapsed during the earthquake would receive a prefabricated house, state officials visited the families in Muzaffarabad to register the project's beneficiaries. Despite - or rather because of - this procedure, the distribution of the shelters created conflicts, since many families to whom the officials had promised a shelter were left empty-handed. While state officials insisted that the procedure was transparent and fair, people criticised and resisted the fraudulent and unjust practices of bureaucrats and politicians, who deprived them of what they were entitled to.
Paper short abstract:
This paper brings in the concept of kinning to the anthropology of disaster response and migration. It does so by studying intimate relationships formed between the Chernobyl children from Belarus and their host families in Italy within the humanitarian programme of child recuperation abroad.
Paper long abstract:
This paper brings in the concept of kinning from the anthropology of adoption and care work to the anthropology of disaster response and migration. It does so by studying intimate relationships formed between the Chernobyl children from Belarus and their host families in Italy within the humanitarian programme of child recuperation abroad. It is argued that these intimate relationships can be understood as kinning; kinning implies an intimate disaster response, a process of fostering transnational relations on people-to-people level during humanitarian assistance independently of non-state, state, and supranational institutions. The manuscript shows that kinning with host families in childhood resulted in education migration of the grown up Chernobyl children to Italy in adulthood. The essay concludes that rather than placing disaster response and migration into the anthropology of the suffering, it is worth exploring these phenomena through the anthropology of the good.