S10E1 - Contemplating Catastrophe: Thinkers, Theory, and Keeping Disaster Studies Alive

Episode overview
Season 10 opens with a live conversation setting the intellectual frame for a new series built around Contemplating Catastrophe, an edited collection of short essays engaging thinkers outside conventional disaster studies. The episode reflects on why reading beyond the field matters, how theory reshapes practice, and why eclectic, critical scholarship is essential for the future of disaster research.

Hosts

• Jason von Meding

• Ksenia Chmutina

Guests

• A.J. Faas — anthropologist and disaster scholar

• J.C. Gaillard — geographer and disaster researcher

Key themes

• Why disaster studies must continually read beyond itself

• Theory as a way to unsettle settled ideas, not as abstraction for its own sake

• Eclecticism, curiosity, and “thinking with” rather than “thinking about” communities

• The limits of normative frameworks (e.g., vulnerability, “no natural disasters”)

• How critical theory informs practice, not just scholarship

• The importance of non-Anglophone, non-Western, and untranslated bodies of thought

• Creating intellectual space for early-career researchers to take theoretical risks

Core discussion highlights

• Introduction to Contemplating Catastrophe, a collection of short essays on thinkers who shape disaster thinking indirectly—philosophers, artists, theorists, and writers outside the field.

• A.J. Faas discusses reading across philosophy, literature, anthropology, and history to keep thought “lively,” and reflects on how Gramsci and Santiago Castro-Gómez help disaster scholars rethink power, hegemony, and relationality.

• J.C. Gaillard reflects on frustration with disaster practice as a driver for engaging critical theory, particularly Foucault, and argues that theory liberates practice rather than distracting from it.

• Shared concern that dominant concepts can silence alternative ontologies and lived realities if left unexamined.

• A collective call to broaden disaster scholarship beyond Euro-American traditions and to value thinkers writing in other languages and contexts.

Season 10 structure

• Live episodes recorded through 2025, archived on our Youtube channel!

• Thematic episodes planned on feminism, urbanism, anarchism, Black power, Latin American and Caribbean thought, East and Southeast Asian intellectual traditions, and Eastern philosophies.