Disaster upon Disaster: Exploring the Gap Between Knowledge, Policy, and Practice

A consistent problem that confronts disaster reduction is the disjunction between academic and expert knowledge and policies and practices of agencies mandated to deal with the concern. Although a great deal of knowledge has been acquired regarding many aspects of disasters, such as driving factors, risk construction, complexity of resettlement, and importance of peoples’ culture, very little has become protocol and procedure. Disaster Upon Disaster illuminates the numerous disjunctions between the suppositions, realities, agendas, and executions in the field, goes on to detail contingencies, predicaments, old and new plights, and finally advances solutions toward greatly improved outcomes.

Susanna M. Hoffman is author, co-author, and editor of twelve books, including The Angry Earth 1 & 2 and Catastrophe and Culture, two ethnographic films, and over forty articles. She initiated the Risk and Disaster Thematic Interest Group at the Society for Applied Anthropology, is the founder and chair of the Risk and Disaster Commission for the International Union of Anthropology and Ethnographic Sciences, and was the first recipient of the Aegean Initiative Fulbright concerning the Greek and Turkish earthquakes.

Roberto E. Barrios is Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. During the last twenty years, he has conducted ethnographies of disaster recovery in Honduras, Mexico, New Orleans, Houston, and Southern Illinois. His work focuses on the inherent assumptions about the nature of communities and people embedded in disaster recovery policy, and how disaster survivors interpret, reconfigure, and sometimes resist these assumptions. He is author of Governing Affect: Neoliberalism and Disaster Reconstruction and has published various articles in the journals Disasters, Annual Review of Anthropology, Identities, and Human Organization.