Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This ethnographic exploration of an urban search and rescue team in Istanbul conceptualises “ambiguous seismic time,” where the professional practice of earthquake preparedness reveal symptomatic temporal oscillations between inevitable disastrous futures and unresolved catastrophic memories.

Paper long abstract

Governance of impending emergencies has predominantly been studied through a futurist lens, revolving around concepts such as uncertainty (Button, 2010), risk (Mills, 2019), or anticipatory action (Anderson, 2010). This work highlights the limits of futurity and contributes to the recent literature that foregrounds the analytical and material significance of social memory in governing disasters yet-to-come (Gulum, 2024; Kroepsch et al., 2018). Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a volunteer Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) team in Istanbul, the study investigates how these professionals temporally situate themselves in preparing for the expected Grand Istanbul Earthquake. In an urban context laden with recurrent devastating earthquakes, their professional practice unfolds within a unique temporal terrain, theorized here as ambiguous seismic time; a temporal condition shaped by the tension between uncertain yet inevitable futures and unresolved catastrophic memories. Focusing on the team’s training sessions, this research examines symptomatic temporal ruptures manifesting in the conflictual self-imaginations of USAR professionals as both experienced rescuers and potential victims: Enacting "as-if" scenarios, seeking to make future disasters palpable in the present, yet the epistemic value and reliability of these anticipatory tools are often disrupted by the spectral presence of their experiences in past devastating earthquakes in Turkey. Those ethnographic moments set a broader conversation regarding existing bureaucratic inertia, urban precarity, and Turkey’s prevailing memory regime organized around manufactured amnesia; all delimiting the possibilities for meaningful anticipatory action.