What is a Disaster? 1: A Call for Plurality in Recent Disaster Scholarship

This Progress Report is the first of three reports that revisit what could be perceived as a simple question—what is a disaster? In this first review, instead of providing a comprehensive historical overview of the concept, the Progress Report provides an overview of the tensions and the diversity of (mis)understandings of disasters in what could be called interdisciplinary disaster studies. In particular, it reviews how the more recent debates have shifted toward the analysis of and the call for a political framing of disaster as well as challenging the universality of the concept of disasters. Such shifts mark a move toward more meaningful, critical, and ethical disaster studies—the kind of disaster studies that generate new ideas, values, and commitment that will hopefully one day take the place of the capitalist, extractivist, oppressive, and unjust logic that continues to recreate violence, oppression, and disaster risk.