Disaster narratives, power relations, and infrastructure: The case of El Niño flooding in peri-urban Piura, Peru
Topics:
Keywords: Disaster, Flood, El Niño, Political Ecology, Assemblage, Peru
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Authors:
Martha G. Bell, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru
Ayesha Siddiqi, University of Cambridge
Rafael Mendoza, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru
Maria Jose Montoya, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru
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Abstract
Scholars have long recognised that disasters ‘provide researchers a unique opportunity’ (Oliver-Smith & Hoffman 1999) or ‘analytical window’ (Siddiqi 2019) to understand wider societal organisation and political priorities. Increasingly, it is also argued that climate change is not just a “physical phenomena” to be measured and observed but also a powerful “idea to be debated, adapted and used”. The story of this idea, especially the way it means different things to different people at different times, reveals much about how societies “think, feel and act” (Hulme 2010), and also serves to link humans and non-humans in complex assemblages and relationships.
Drawing on these literatures and the findings of our project on El Niño related flooding in the north coast of Peru, this paper examines flooding as a “social phenomenon” to understand the ways in which disaster experiences are structured through complex assemblages of human and non-human relationships. The inundacion of 2017 (the most recent flood), as constructed in the memories and narratives of our interviewees, provides the language and tools through which tangible forms of (social, political, racial) inequality can be felt, articulated, and discussed.
Vulnerability to flooding on the north coast of Peru has been constructed over centuries of colonial, republican, and then neoliberal rule. Yet, we argue that the event ‘inundacion de dos mil diecisiete’ gave rise to new tensions in discourses about flooding, infrastructure, and inequality. This paper examines these tensions to explore the ways in which inequality is lived and experienced in peri-urban coastal Peru.
Disaster narratives, power relations, and infrastructure: The case of El Niño flooding in peri-urban Piura, Peru
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract