@article{ref1,
title="Disasters and "conditions of possibility": rethinking causation through an analysis of Nepal earthquakes",
journal="Disasters",
year="2020",
author="Liechty, Mark",
volume="ePub",
number="ePub",
pages="ePub-ePub",
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 &quot;critical junctures&quot; that &quot;trigger&quot; events unfolding in the disaster's wake. In this paper I argue that the &quot;critical junctures&quot; paradigm shares limitations with &quot;path dependency&quot; 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 &quot;conditions of possibility&quot; as a way of rethinking agency/causation away from individual subjects, events, or even historical conditions toward, instead, the new, radically-destabilized &quot;epistemological field&quot; emerging in the disaster's aftermath. This paper examines a series of devastating earthquakes in Nepal to consider how post-disaster &quot;epistemological fields&quot; open up new &quot;conditions of possibility&quot; 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.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0361-3666",
doi="10.1111/disa.12459",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/disa.12459"
}