The invention of disaster: epistemological heritage and future challenges

IAS Residential Fellow Prof JC Gaillard delivers a seminar on his research.

This seminar will argue that the domination of Western knowledge in disaster scholarship has allowed for normative policies and practices of disaster risk reduction to be imposed all over the world. It will take a postcolonial approach to challenge power relations between researchers and deconstruct concepts, discourses and forms of governments inherited from the Enlightenment. This seminar will ultimately encourage the emergence of more diverse worldviews and ways of knowing for both studying disasters and informing policy and practice of disaster risk reduction. Such pluralism is essential to better reflect local realities of what disasters actually are around the world.