Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Cultural Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students

Primary Theme: The Political

Secondary Theme: Inequality

(4-0100) Ethnography in/of Disastrous Times

Ethnography in/of Disastrous Times

Disasters are often characterized as sudden events causing great damage or disruption. Yet much ethnographic research has shown that disasters are perhaps better understood as processes, without easily demarcated beginnings and ends. Disasters, thus, come in a variety of temporal articulations: sudden and latent, slow and fast, anticipated, imminent, and chronic. Indeed, as phenomena of cross-cutting dimensions and scale, disasters elicit new forms of politics, governance, and modes of living; concomitantly, disasters also offer challenges and opportunities for new modes of ethnographic sensibilities and practices. To attend to disasters as objects of ethnographic investigation and as forces that shape ethnographic research, this panel focuses on how disasters are imagined, managed, governed, and experienced in timescapes. How do history and futurity shape the contours and ontologies of disasters? What tempos of violence emerge by taking seriously the chronopolitics of disasters? And what new social relations are created when a particular group of people are identified as an at-risk community and their environment becomes subject to science and policy experiments? With research spanning across various sites and “disasters”—from the Sewol Ferry Disaster in South Korea, to climate change in Bangladesh, anti-malarial drug resistance in Cambodia, disaster nationalism in Sri Lanka to industrial casualties in the United States— this panel explores how spatiotemporal framings work as techniques of governance and management, while shaping social memory, quotidian life, and institutional responses.

Chair(s)

• Kim Fortun

  Professor
  University of California, Irvine

Organizer(s)

• Vivian Choi

  Assistant Professor of Anthropology
  St. Olaf College

Presenter(s)

• Vivian Choi

  Assistant Professor of Anthropology
  St. Olaf College

• Dilshanie Perera

  PhD Candidate
  Stanford University

• Hyeon Jung Lee

  Seoul National University

• Jenna Grant

  Assistant Professor
  University of Washington

Organizer(s)

• Yoonjung Lee

  KAIST

Presenter(s)

• Yoonjung Lee

  KAIST

Discussant(s)

• Stefanie Graeter

  University of Chicago

Presentations:

• 8:00 AM - 8:15 AM

  Synchronicities: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka
  Vivian Y. Choi – St. Olaf College
• 8:15 AM - 8:30 AM

  Living on Borrowed Time: Counterfactual Pasts and Imagined Futures in Rural Bangladesh
  Dilshanie Perera – Stanford University
• 8:30 AM - 8:45 AM

  Genealogies of a Disaster: History and Trauma After the Sinking of MV Sewol
  Hyeon Jung Lee – Seoul National University
• 8:45 AM - 9:00 AM

  Emergence and Return: Chronopolitics of Malaria Drug Resistance in Cambodia
  Jenna M. Grant – University of Washington
• 9:00 AM - 9:15 AM

  Industrial Violence and Accidental Injuries
  Yoonjung Lee – KAIST
• 9:15 AM - 9:30 AM

  Discussion
  Stefanie Graeter – University of Chicago