Short abstract:

Emergencies are frictional. The allure of engaging catastrophe through radically new epistemic frames is undone through local frictions that resist reductionist capture. Instead, thinking emergency epistemics requires cultivating improvised speculative practices of engagement with such friction

Long abstract:

In moments of acute crisis, the temptation to enact distinct epistemic frames is strong. The rise of anthropocene politics, climate change, and other perceived existential threats call for radical transformations of technoscientific practices. But the allure of such ‘emergency epistemics’ is deceptive. At moments of crisis, exceptional measures meet quotidian life-worlds and longstanding conditions of vulnerability. The frictions generated in these ‘sticky practical encounters’ subvert the emergency epistemics. ‘Actionable knowledge’ becomes a demand diverted and disrupted. To explore these processes and problematize the allure of emergency epistemics, this article historicizes humanitarian design responses. It does so focussing on the devastating 1970 Bhola cyclone in East Pakistan, present-day Bangladesh. This disaster shows the aspirations of an emergency epistemics, unable to get a grip over the disaster situation and subverted through a range of practices crossing scales. Instead of generating actionable knowledge on the terms given, the emergency opened a pathway for a situated improvising of humanitarian design responses grounded in systems-thinking, resilience, and appropriate technology precepts. We use this example to disaggregate how techno-scientific practices are recalibrated in creolized encounters with unexpected but also entirely unexceptional frictions that disasters do not create but crystalize. In doing so, we are especially concerned with reading techno-scientific engagements with humanitarian disasters through a postcolonial frame that critiques the dichotomy between exceptional emergency and technocratic management as well that between global and local. Instead, we conceptualize humanitarian design as necessarily involving the development of frictional speculative practices that stay with the world’s trouble.