Liquefying nature: Assemblages, cyclone expertise and the possibility of alternative life-worlds
Topics:
Keywords: DRR, Assemblages, Expertise, Risk, Vulnerability, India, Cyclone, Knowledge
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Authors:
Anna Bridel,
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Abstract
This paper contributes to current debates at the interface of Geography and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) about how certain ways of knowing risk gain authority in particular socio-political contexts, and how this process might be disrupted to enable alternative life-worlds to emerge (e.g. Castree and Braun 2001; Castree et al 2014; Mahony and Hulme 2018). Assemblage Theory (AT) has been a productive approach in this regard (e.g. Donovan 2017) yet has faced challenges when accounting for fluidity and change in configurations of knowledges, actors and politics (Muller and Schurr 2016). In this paper I seek to add to AT by drawing upon the concept of discourse coalitions (Hajer 1993) to indicate fluid processes of making and unmaking disaster risk expertise. I apply this analysis to assemblages of cyclone risk expertise in Kerala, India, where Cyclone Ockhi resulted in the death of approximately 200 fishers in 2017, and fishing communities have protested subsequent cyclone risk policies but been unable to alter official epistemologies of vulnerability. I show how discourse coalitions between fishers and government actors both close down the audibility of fisher voices and indicate openings for alternative life-worlds to emerge within existing assemblages of risk expertise. By indicating these aspects of fluidity in assemblages the paper suggests ways in which merely giving local people a platform to speak about their experiences of hazard vulnerability may be insufficient to change climate futures without also understanding the politics of how their voices become audible.
Liquefying nature: Assemblages, cyclone expertise and the possibility of alternative life-worlds
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract