Citation

Liechty M. Disasters 2020; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/disa.12459

PMID

32772394

Abstract

What causes a disaster's aftermath? Scholars have increasingly turned toward historical approaches that link outcomes to pre-disaster sociopolitical dynamics. Disasters lead to "critical junctures" that "trigger" events unfolding in the disaster's wake. In this paper I argue that the "critical junctures" paradigm shares limitations with "path dependency" theory from which it derives, namely a tendency toward historicism-a functionalist teleology better able to explain continuity than change. As an alternative, I use Foucault's understanding of "conditions of possibility" as a way of rethinking agency/causation away from individual subjects, events, or even historical conditions toward, instead, the new, radically-destabilized "epistemological field" emerging in the disaster's aftermath. This paper examines a series of devastating earthquakes in Nepal to consider how post-disaster "epistemological fields" open up new "conditions of possibility" within which new ideas, actions, and outcomes become thinkable and possible in ways that pre-disaster historical conditions could not have predicted. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

theory; Nepal; earthquakes; agency; historical causation; historicism