Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork to address how the advantage time that earthquake early warning systems make possible comes to be more valuable or less so.I argue that this contested valuation articulates material energies with human practice.

Paper long abstract:

An earthquake is a matter of energy traveling through soils, waters, buildings, and bodies, but it does not do so quickly.  Radio waves move faster, and the difference between the speed of an earthquake and a radio signal about it can be leveraged. Mexico's earthquake early warning system exploits those differences to alert users before sizable earthquakes. While the margin of difference between the speed of radio and seismic waves close to a quake's epicenter is small, increasing amounts of "advantage" time are available at greater distance and as algorithms are refined, communications infrastructures developed, and receivers fine-tuned. The value of advantage time is something else entirely for many users, despite the best efforts of risk management experts.

In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork on Mexican seismicity to discuss how this advantage time that earthquake monitoring systems make possible comes to be more valuable or less so. This work develops from the insight that when the value of technical endeavor is at issue, what is at stake is "a politics," in the words of Helen Verran, "over what there is and who/what can know it" (1998:238). Here, I attend to the production of basic concepts in disaster prevention and in the process denaturalize early warning as a risk management tool. I argue that this contested valuation articulates material energies with human practice.

Referenced:

Verran, Helen. 1998. "Re-imagining land ownership in Australia." Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy 1:237-254.