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Hello! Welcome back everyone to Disaster is Deconstructed.
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Thanks Sonya.
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Yeah, we're back.
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I've missed the music.
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It's been ages.
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So I've been humming along.
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Oh, it's so great to be back.
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bit of dancing like me in my office.
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always dancing, in the office.
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And, we're back with season 10, Jason, season 10.
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We're still standing.
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We're still here.
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I wonder some people might have thought we've, packed it in but never no like we promised right in season one that we'll do this until we drop so far so good six years in still standing strong a bit of a gap a bit of chaos but it's really nice to be back season 10 season nine was slightly different for those of you who are following us we did two stories from two different locations the episodes were created by the researchers themselves who are doing the research if you haven't listened to season nine yet please listen to it their stories are great one from the uk one from nepal it's something that we kind of wanted to do so it was super exciting it was definitely something different and i think as we go on if we have opportunities to bring in those local stories it's a priority if anybody has ideas for future seasons just reach out to us we'd love to do more things like we did last season we're really excited about season 10 because it's aligned with A project we're working on that's close to our hearts, Ksenia, you want to talk a little bit about it? Yeah, and we're just kind of, you know, season nine was all like voices from the ground and season ten we're back on our theoretical intellectual horse with a wink to the poster that we're using today.
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Right.
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over the past year and a half, Jason, whilst we're not too busy with podcasts, we're still talking about things.
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And for those of you who have been following our work, you know that, we're really inspired in our disaster scholarship by, writings thinkings and art of people who are not disaster scholars at all, we get inspired from fiction to critical theory, you name it.
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You know, we've kind of covered it in previous, And so what we started doing, with Jason and thanks to lots of friends and comrades and scholars all around the world, we started putting together a volume.
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it's not quite real yet, but hopefully it will be real soon.
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which originally was called, it's a really cheesy name, 100 thinkers, but now Jason improved it dramatically by renaming it Contemplating Catastrophe.
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basically what we invited our friends and colleagues to do is to write us an essay about a thinker whose work they really engage with and we made it quite clear that we do not want any of the thinkers to be disaster scholars, you know, as great as their work is, as important as their work is.
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We wanted to get people to think outside of the box and engage with literature, theory, philosophy, whatever it is they want to engage with, and to write about people that.
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definitely have or should influence our thinking in disaster scholarship and practice, but maybe other people are not, aware of at all.
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so it's been super exciting, last year we've been reading and editing the, essays that we've been getting, we're now at 88 or 86.
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I think we've given up on my terrible 100, numbers.
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watch this space.
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we have really exciting plans for this selection of essays.
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But this season, season 10, is going to be built around the thinkers and the entries that we have been getting through the year.
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Thank you for watching.
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through the season, we will be talking to people who have kindly written these essays for us.
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so yeah, it's going to be super fun, right? Yeah, I'm really excited about it.
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I want to talk a bit about the structure of the year.
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and then bring in some special guests to talk about the, season and introduce it.
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What we're planning is a live stream every three weeks up through May, to get us halfway through our, idea, of themes, in the project of these 80 some essays.
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And by the way, I love the way you say essay.
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I need to start saying essay instead of essay.
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I Anyhow, I like how you say it better.
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You just completely blowed my mind, but yeah, sure, okay, let's go.
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So, we're gonna get through...
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Welcome back to Disasters Deconstructed.
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None of the conversations make any sense.
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in any case, we'll get up through May.
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About halfway through the season, and then we want you all to take a reading break for the summer.
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hopefully we'll have, some suggestions, maybe we can all read together a few things.
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Yes, please.
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Are you still enjoying the essay thing? I'm still, I'm gonna, for the rest of this episode, I'm just gonna, like, giggle quietly to myself.
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Don't mind me, you after the reading break, hopefully, we can read some things together.
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We'll come back in September for another.
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series of live streams every three weeks, through the conclusion.
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I hope, by the time we reach the end of the season, everything's published.
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that would be my hope.
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All the essays are published.
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we're really working on it.
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yeah, yeah.
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We really do appreciate everybody's contributions.
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they're incredible.
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It's been so much fun to read and comment on all these essays.
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the way we've structured the season is, an introduction and conclusion.
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But in between, we've tried to look at key areas of thought, and set up some shows with some of the authors that have contributed exploring those areas of thought.
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So, we have episodes on feminism, urbanism, anarchism, black power, Latin American and the Caribbean.
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intellectual movements in Japan and China, Philippines, and eastern philosophical traditions.
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I think that's the scope were thinking right now.
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This could change a little but I think that kinda of captures the main areas of thoughts.
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So we're excited about this and thank you all for joining us for the season.
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it'll be great and we thought we would start the season with two of our really good friends our comrades these two people were basically the first people who actually discussed the idea of this hundred thinkers Volume.
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they both encouraged us.
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So if you, think this is a terrible idea, you can blame them as much as you blame us.
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it is, our absolute pleasure, to host today JC Gaillard.
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and AJ Fazz, who I don't need any introduction, you all know them really really well, and they have both written not one but two entries for our volume because, we volunteered them to do so, Hi, JC.
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Hi, AJ.
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This is it.
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I've started, you know, swapping names now.
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Here we go.
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Welcome.
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Welcome.
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Great to have you back.
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Thank you for joining us.
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AJ, second time? This is my second time.
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I'm nowhere near the number of appearances that JC has made.
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now that I just wrote in here today, This is honestly, one of my favorite places to hang out, and I'm super happy to be here, to be invited, And I like that it's JC and I together in the same space, At least some people can...
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Now, realize that we're not the same person.
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the same person.
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But, Jason, I also feel like we should have, you know, just like, okay, you'll have to use three letters.
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There's kind of no escape.
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I could have used my normal, you know, that I side with.
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So we just all use consonants, you know, for our names.
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can start today's episode.
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Yeah.
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the whole point of today's discussion is to brainstorm why AJ uses full stops in his initials and why I don't, right? that's the purpose of the existential question.
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indeed.
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We've been trying to answer.
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It's the hazard of the vowel.
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So you don't have to deal with the vowel.
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If I don't use the full stops, then I get odd.
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And then I get addressed as odd.
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That's false.
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That's a very good point.
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Okay.
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Now that we're clear on that, shall we talk about the problem? all the hard issues right up front.
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Which has made my day, because now I have an answer.
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been wandering for years.
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When people ask me why I don't use full stops, then I don't have a vowel.
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that's an answer.
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Perfect.
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No? Sorry? Your name has a hyphen, like the full name.
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forget about the iPhones, too much.
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Okay, Jason, please move us on, otherwise we will be here for an hour.
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said, no banter.
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Yeah, no banter, not at all, we never do that on this podcast.
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We're serious.
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Serious establishment.
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Look at us.
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let's move on to talk about the horse picture.
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No, just kidding.
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As we should.
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Well, I don't know if anybody caught the reference to AJ riding into this.
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session but you may have seen the poster for the session with the horse picture we received this picture a while ago and we just can oh yes we didn't yeah we haven't received this from the original source i love this horse picture so much i just called budget sorry jc you'll have to try it really hard you know promise i'll try something that matches that okay, so let's talk about, this core, reason we had this idea in the first place, like something we talk about pretty much in every season, I think, or every time we are, in conversation, I think, Ksenia, reading outside of our, disaster studies, outside of our field, reading across different, So the whole point of this, volume that we've been working on of essays was to get people, to engage with perspectives they might not be familiar with, right? So I wanted to, start with you, AJ, just ask you how you, think about that, idea of people engaging with perspectives they're not familiar with, and then maybe personally, what do you love to read, how did you get into reading that stuff that you're reading, what's your process of finding things to challenge you intellectually? thank you for that question, I just want to say thanks again, for having me, this is one of my favorite places to hang out, and the three of you are some of my favorite people, to hang out with, so it's really, a lot of fun to be here.
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what do I read? how have I gotten started reading different things? I mean, I could set off.
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wildly and every direction to try to answer that question.
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but I think the first part, of the question about, like, sort of engaging with perspectives we're not familiar with.
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I think that this project this book, that is the topic of this season.
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I think the project and its objectives are really terrific, no matter the field, the settling of thought is boring at best, and violent and totalitarian at worst.
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I also think that one of the most important, I don't know, what you might call metafunctions of, of, of the arts, of sciences, of humanities is to keep thought lively and in play.
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and so long as we're discussing, disasters as I believe we're meant to do here.
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I think that there are real opportunities to, disrupt some seemingly settled figurations of thought and, set off in new directions.
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as for what I read, I recently in a conversation with my wife, said something like, I pointed out that she reads a lot of biographies and I don't.
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And then as soon as I finished saying that, I, rattled off a list of like 35 biographies that I'd read.
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I guess I do.
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I've got a constant rotation.
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Of, mostly philosophy, fiction, poetry, art, history.
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I do also read social science as part of my job.
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but you name it, I read, very actively and I devote a lot of time to it.
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Sometimes I pick something up, because of a recommendation.
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I was in a conversation recently with, the great Beth Marino.
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and she told me that Candace Callison's, How Climate Change Comes to Matter was her favorite ethnography of climate change.
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coming from her, I knew that meant I had to read it.
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And that happens in conversations.
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all the time.
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I've been turned on to things on this very podcast, which first got me reading, Fiola Jacobs' important work, after her appearance on the podcast.
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I can name, several other examples, both in, your written work and what I, sometimes things just come up repeatedly as references in whatever I'm reading, and that could be literary too, literary allusions and whatnots.
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I'm occasionally methodical.
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It's when I take a deep dive, which I'm doing another one right now, a deep dive on the history of liberalism.
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I'm in my fourth wave of deep dives on the concept of nature.
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but usually I'm jumping back and forth, between older and newer texts across every genre.
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Which is, it's not only just sort of fun, it often results in all kinds of serendipitous things.
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hybrid connections in my thought between, say, literature and philosophy and anthropology.
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Thank you so much for sharing.
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And, J .C.,
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I want to ask you kind of the same question.
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How do you approach this question of the importance of, reading broadly? And what's your...
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how did you get to it? Thanks, Jason.
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I think the, if there's one commonality with what, AJ said, Would be probably eclecticism.
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I like to read very diverse stuff.
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probably more academic than AJ, because I think you've got a wider range than I have.
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to me, if, I'm trying to think of why I've started to read, beyond disaster studies is, What I call my frustration with the field, which came out of practice more than academia and how I couldn't find the answers to the challenges I was facing.
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Facing the field as a practitioner.
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I couldn't find the answers to the issues I was facing and I had to go beyond disaster studies to engage with some more insightful, literature that was bringing me new ideas.
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And that's how I started to read Foucault, for example, 13, 14 years ago, and opening up into a whole range of new critical theory, thinkers.
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I would say that I read Foucault.
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First and foremost stuff outside of disaster studies.
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Although I'm super excited about my latest, acquisition.
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it's on top of my, reading list now.
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I just got it two days ago.
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Finally.
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I love that book.
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It's great.
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Oh my goodness.
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perfect timing.
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But is it signed? That's the question.
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It's a sign, yeah.
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Because I have a signed copy.
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Shocking.
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Okay, I Enough self -promotion.
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I would read, I think on my desk at the moment at home, I've got some stuff on Orientalism in the arts.
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I've got stuff from, Asian, critical thinkers, not very well known in the West.
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I've got, stuff by Foucault, I think.
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and I've got a few other stuff from, Philippine studies.
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In English and in Filipino as well.
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So I think, it's more about being curious.
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disaster studies as a field provides a nice, platform for engaging with diverse eclectic literature because you can touch upon so many different things.
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over the past 15 years, I got into the digital agenda on the arts, on this ability, on, all sorts of philosophical schools of thought.
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Because of the things I was encountering in the field.
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I think our field is very well placed to stimulate that kind of engagement.
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with diverse sets of literature.
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that gives me a really nice segue to my next question.
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And I will start with you JC kind of or continue with you and you know, for both of you, for, for for you, AJ, and for you JC, your scholarship's kind of very much outside of the like normative disaster studies, you both have really been pushing the boundaries of how we kind of do disaster side is how we think about virus concepts and various practices.
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So what inspires you and your work, JC, you started alluding a little bit to this, but can you tell us a little more about your inspirations? why do you care so much? But I think when I was, Trying to impose, such normative concepts as vulnerability capacities, within very standardized, framework for reducing the risk of disasters.
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I was not, getting the response I was expecting from the people I was working with, because the concept didn't make sense.
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I had to understand why these concepts didn't make sense.
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I used to be very much, enclosed into my disaster studies silo.
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back in the two thousands, and I realized that I had to, I had to go to be in that if I wanted to understand why, because the literature on disasters was kind of going in circle.
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and I had to go beyond that.
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first I returned To the classics of the 1970s, our own kind of mentors, who, used to cite and refer to, think as much beyond disaster studies.
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And actually, if you look at what Ben Wiesner, Phil O and all these guys were citing in the 1970s, there were very, very few stuff that we would label disaster studies nowadays.
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the first turning point, Was how they managed to, change the field by introducing the concept of vulnerability as a prompt, not as a silver bullet meant to be rolled out all over the world.
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looking back at what they did and how they came up with something new was an inspiration for reading outside of the field.
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At the time, they were reading, a lot of Marxist stuff.
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either orthodox or less orthodox.
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they were reading a lot of Althusser, Balibar and those kind of things as well in the 1970s.
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But, I mean, that was a source of inspiration, back then for me.
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back then, it's kind of 15, 13 years ago.
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Super, thanks JC.
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AJ, same question to you, why are you trying to challenge us all and, make us think it could be so easy, I want to begin with a commercial.
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for, one of my favorite recent books.
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JC Gayle, The Invention of Disaster.
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had so much flattery in my life.
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which was really interesting, and I think it is relevant to how I'd like to answer this question.
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while JC and I, know each other, never in person, though, only in virtual spaces, we've known each other's work for quite some time, his book came out just as I was finishing my last book, I think it was the two of you, Jason and Ksenia, who pointed out some of the parallel directions that we had gone into in our work, independently of one another.
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but I think we had very similar experiences, I really relate a lot with what J .C.
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just said, because I'd say that I'm inspired by thinking with others, and I think that preposition of with is really important, of thinking with worlds, like, unfolding around myself and others.
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I made a bit of an issue in my last book about the core disasters.
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argument, which is really sort of an older political ecological argument about no natural disasters I continue to try and, trouble this in my work and don't get me wrong.
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I mean, I think it's a really important argument that belongs in our conversation, but much like JC, my first problem was that it doesn't play very well with a lot of others, such as my friends in Penipe, who regard the volcano Tungurahua as grandmother and recognize a range of kinship relations with the landscape and other species that, very much in society might otherwise be relegated to, quote, unquote, nature.
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So I'm concerned that this argument leaves the nature culture binary, of the enlightenment and even the anti -enlightenment sort of romanticism, wholly undisturbed.
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And so what inspires me is thought and praxis that, like, disrupts these and other related conventions of thought and the types of relationalities they engender.
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I don't want some rigid argument for, what is.
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nor some totalitarian imposition of categories and binaries that would silence my friends in Penipe before they ever have a chance to speak, right? I want to think with them about worlds unfolding, coming into being, and to think with them in the species and waters they course across the landscape, I'm inspired by, folks like all of you and others who keep the courses of coming and going alive, who are deeply curious about the world as much as they are deeply unsettled by power and inequality.
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how can we take on power and inequality if we restrict ourselves to the terms, dictated by these rules? So I could go on.
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I'll leave it there.
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great.
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Yeah, so, I wanna move to talk a little bit more about what you both wrote, in your essays for this collection.
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And, just sticking with you, A .J.,
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you wrote, about Santiago Castro Gómez and Antonio Gramsci.
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I know there was, a bit of a fight about who would get Gramsci.
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I know Tony Oliver Smith was interested.
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But, you got in there first, AJ, why did you, come back to us and suggest these thinkers, as you engaged with their work and came up with these manuscripts for us.
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What do you think disaster scholars need to know? why should disaster scholars be engaging with their work? what were you hoping readers would get out of that? Well, excellent question.
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it's impossible to answer in a limited amount of time, but I'll do what I can.
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I didn't realize that there was so much competition.
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For what it's worth, I think I lost out on Foucault to JC, but I'm very glad that he's in his capable hands.
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I imagine there was a lot of competition for those two thinkers.
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let me start, If I can with Gramsci, and the, I think, two primary reasons, well, each of my reasons is like nine reasons in a trench coat, but the, the, the two main reasons that, that he's really important to me, first is that while I had read plenty of philosophy.
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Gramsci was the first theorist I read seriously once I really committed to a career in social science.
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this was before I got into the, disaster space, but somewhere around my senior year of undergraduate and my early master's studies.
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I was starting to read, Foucault, Fanon, Bourdieu, and others at the time as challenging as the prison notebooks are to read, I found Gramsci to be a really good partner for working through some of the most basic problems that affected my thought at the time.
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Gramsci was really trying to overcome the structural functionalism of the scientific Marxism that was ascendant at his time, which was this Billiard ball theory of the world and to make sense of the formation of like social, cultural, political thoughts, subjectivity and praxis and, differently assembled capitalist, societies, this, this weird sort of spaces that Italy was at the time, especially his notion of hegemony as a question, not an answer.
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About the soft formation of power for me, was and remains fascinating.
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his attention to literature and the arts in a way that didn't dismiss them as somehow, epiphenomenal to material conditions.
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And his framework of the historical block, all in a way, prefigure.
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at least how I handle this domain of thought and practice, and this perpetual sort of becoming of entanglements of multiplicity, I think it's an important sort of bridging line of thought for students of, social science.
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it wasn't just me, but I see my own students.
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year after year, coming to social science, looking for something like laws or objective principles governing human behavior and systems, much as I once did, Gramsci is a sort of an excellent example of that.
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I think gateway to thinking beyond such state like rigidities of thought.
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if I could say something This is simply also about santiago castro gomez's very important work I think he became important for me.
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as a latin american theorist Who worked to conduct critical examinations of the present, he's inspired quite a bit by Foucault himself, without locating the machinations of power and knowledge outside of Latin America and the global south, his genealogical approach to Latin American thought and society, really envisions as its object, not one logic and system of power driving history, but many that might be operating at the time of any encounter and which are transformed by encounters.
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He wants to think with and not just about and so I found myself inspired by his abandonment of both historicist and humanist figures of thought in favor of attention to particular relations and discourses as ontologically prior to anything, like generalizable humanity, I'm taken with his skepticism of logocentrism, enlightenment concepts, nature and human nature, and again, thinking, with others from, embedded positions on the peripheries of global systems that are hardly territorialized Super.
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I didn't know about Santiago Castro Gomez before you mentioned his work to us, So I think that's the beauty of this volume there were quite a few thinkers that both Jason and I were like, Oh, we don't know who those people are.
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Like, why don't we know? thanks for bringing that in.
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It's fantastic, to really get through that.
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us all thinking about this work that doesn't quite circulate in the disciplines that we are working on jesse same question to you The two entries for us, and I remember you and I were sitting in British Library, and talking about this, right, I think I asked you to write about Glissant, and you said I'd rather write about Foucault.
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But then I bought you another beetroot latte and you agreed to write about the song as well.
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that's how it, you know, just little bribery goes a long way, isn't it? beetroot on this podcast, please.
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That's an object of banter.
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Yeah, this never gets old, JC's love for beetroot.
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But anyhow, you were the first person to submit the entry, so I wish I had a star, but here's the imaginary star.
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I'll get you another.
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I'm the last to read that book, Okay, so the star just kind of got cancelled.
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But anyway, beetroot latte is on me, or chai, or whatever.
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You want a surprise.
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remember well, you, you're suggesting that I would do, I would do Glissant in the first place and my issue I remember was legitimacy.
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I wanted someone, and this is why I wanted Foucault because I wanted to do a francophone, thing.
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Someone I would be able to read in their original language.
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And I think for me it was important.
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I've never read Fukui in English, I'm not sure how it's translated.
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But, I think to me it was important.
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That's why I suggested a few people from Southeast Asia as well, especially Salazar, whom I know and work with his thoughts quite a lot at the moment, I think they are more legitimate people to do sell as a, for example.
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so I think for me it was, somehow much more pragmatic answer than, ages fantastic kind of theoretical and inspirational kind of, decision for me.
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It was a pragmatic, Choice.
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I knew I didn't want to do Bourdieu, I didn't want to do, I can't do Deleuze, it's too much for me.
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so, oh, I'm not yet there, probably.
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So, yeah, I mean, I think, I think, Foucault was an obvious choice in the sense that he was probably one of the first, Critical thinkers I deeply engage with for my own work to inform my own work originally the key entry point was the idea of norms.
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Because I was concerned by how normative our field is and how it doesn't match, our experiences in the field.
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I was trying to find out why are we so normative? why are we trying to, standardize people's behavior? Foucault was an obvious entry point to understand that beyond, disaster studies.
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And then from them, it's easy to branch out into his own inspirations.
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I love, Canguillem and I wanted to do Canguillem as well.
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I'm not sure if you have Canguillem in the end.
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if you want to do a third entry, now is your chance.
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Too many French philosophers.
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I think we need to diversify the entries.
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And this is why I love the idea at the start.
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Yeah.
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So it was an easy way to branch out into so many different things, both francophone and anglophone.
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but I think that was, again, a very pragmatic, practical, challenge for me that, drew me into these more, theoretical stuff.
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I've come to, so I think I was, and I used to be labeled and, and I think I still.
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I'm labeled a sort of applied geographer by many with all the baggages it carries, I think we did.
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But, yeah, I was very much in that space 20 years ago.
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And I think now I've come to think that, without trying to, paraphrase Lenin, I strongly believe that theory liberates, practice.
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I think the solution to our, practical challenges.
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As practitioners, as policy makers, we all come from more theory and not more practice -driven or, Applied, objectives in our research.
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I strongly believe that.
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I'm not sure how you feel about this, AJ, but to me, the solution is in more theory.
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I couldn't agree with you more on that.
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It'll definitely sound absurd, to some ears, but, I think my last, contribution to the Journal of Disaster Studies was precisely on this topic, right? seemingly pure of heart and pure of practice and, you know, theoretically, Well, I can't quite say ill -informed.
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I mean, I was engaged, and then I just didn't realize, I think some of them used the word metafunctions.
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of the types of theory and concepts, that I was reading, right? I find that I constantly, have to work through stuff theoretically I apologize for it less now, than I once did.
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I say this to my students You need to realize, you'll use a key word or concept, whether it's culture or vulnerability and you have to attune yourself to, the multiplicity of meanings that might have when you're in a conversation with, you know, any type of, a group that has even the slightest bit of diversity to it.
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I also think that, theory, that concepts, Can help do the work of solidarity by putting the disparate cases in context that we work in, like in conversation with one another, right? That's why we can have a meaningful conversation in this space right now.
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even though the particulars are entirely different.
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So we want to blow up the concepts.
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We want to place pressure on these concepts at the end of the day when it comes down to actually making sense of real cases and context.
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But I also think it does the work of solidarity by storing our work together.
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But I think our responsibility now probably is to, share whether it's inviting or in such things as podcast, but it's to share how, theories has helped us.
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In changing the way we approach, field work, whether it's from an academic perspective or from a practitioner's perspective.
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my work with, our NGO CDP in the Philippines, for example, or other local partners in the Philippines has changed since I have engaged with critical theory.
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it has changed and I hope for the better.
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So it's not something limited to my own office and academic writing.
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it has helped me better, deal with practical problems on the ground.
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I think we need to share that because people need to engage with further theory.
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and I think we are going in the right direction because you are.
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I've got, a special guest, in Oakland at the moment, Ricardo Fuente Alba, who many of you, know personally.
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we had a long chat yesterday with Ricardo about how the new generation of, researchers in our field of disaster studies has been informed by the work of critical, theories and how they are game changers in our field.
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I said that it was back then, inspiration for me to write the invention of disasters because there was a momentum towards more theory in our field.
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but these guys, this new generation of early care researchers.
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They are, the game changers because they started with critical theory.
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I like you AJ, but I'm just trying to play catch up, trying to read, back what stuff that I should have Right back in the, in, in my undergraduate years, back in the 1990s, you read Gramsci in your senior undergrad years.
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I read Gramsci, 10 years ago, AJ.
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So, I'm playing catcher, but this new generation of, of researchers is the new hope because they have that embedded in their own scholarship from the very start.
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And we need to spread that word.
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we need to encourage them.
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We need to show how this is important and how this has a critical, practical impact.
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I love that, JC and we're running at about 10 minutes left.
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So, I want to bring this back to the fact that we have this collection coming up of, essays that have the potential to introduce, students, researchers, People who just like to read about, disaster.
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Lots of different people to, different, entry points, you know? Different ways of thinking about disasters, about risk, about society.
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So, what do you think the potential there is? how can this exposure to all these different, entry points change our field, change the field of disaster scholarship.
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what is your hope for this kind of work? JC, maybe first of all, and then AJ.
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I think eclecticism is very important.
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And it's something super exciting in our field.
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It's very easy for us to read very diverse stuff.
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And I personally, I like multitasking.
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I like doing different things every day.
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I like reading different things within the same day as well.
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it's how you take a step back from what you're doing at the same time as learn new things that will inform back this thing that you're doing.
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and I think the more eclecticism, the more diversity in the field.
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And there are so many other threads of theory that we haven't explored yet out of the 88 thinkers you've come up with in the book so far, how many have really been used in our film? maybe not half of them.
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and I would say if one of us, the DD community and the, and the manifesto community at large, we take one thinker and we take it to, studying one dimension of what we call disasters.
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I mean, we may take the field much forward by highlighting things we have possibly not thought of so far.
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I think what's interesting, JC, is that, almost every person who wrote an entry, is inspired by the thinker they wrote about.
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if it's one person in our community that has, really engaged with a thinker, and inspired disaster scholarship that doesn't necessarily register for anybody else, maybe except that one researcher, right? So that's a really tricky thing.
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it's like we are coming from all such different backgrounds and traditions, you know, and so there might be a thinker that has really shaped the thought of one of our colleagues and we don't even know about it, right? We need to be open to new things.
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And as something we discussed again yesterday with Ricardo, I mean, it's probably easier for us who are a bit later in our career, who can take risk, who can take the time to read a bit more than early career researchers who have to deliver, after the expectations of the academia.
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so we need to create that space for them to be able to read and to be.
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As curious as they want to be, I know Journal of Justice Studies is trying to do this as well, but, I'm not sure all journals would accept, a paper framed after, something Belusian or something, Salazarian.
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I think we need to create that space as well so that they have the opportunity to take the risk, which is all benefits to win, win for everyone.
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that was great.
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yeah, I'm right with you on all of that.
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You know, I was just thinking, I started, as an undergraduate when I was, 22 years old.
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Proud first -generation college student.
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I threw myself all the way into it and was already an avid reader of philosophy and literature.
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I have been...
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reading voraciously thousands of volumes since then.
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that was twenty years ago.
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still to this day, I'll pick up a volume, I'll read something and I'll be like, why didn't I read this first? Why couldn't I have grasped some of this stuff 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 5 years ago? why couldn't I have read JC's book before I started my last one? But I'm going to have it before I publish the sequel of The Invention, I Well, yeah, and I'm working on my own, so, yeah, we're...
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So we are competing, the first of us two who is going to publish the sequel of our books.
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my goodness.
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Right.
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But mine's going to be distributed on the Pony Express.
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I We're going to ride out at dawn and that's likely because they're going to dismantle the postal service in the United States.
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the pony will be our only, No, but I think it is, it's, you know, I mean, I, you, you, you know, you mentioned Deleuze before other people, like, just sometimes we start to appreciate thinkers by how they're handled by others.
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I mean, anybody listening carefully to everything I just said about Gramsci and, Castro Gomez will hear very Deleuzian language.
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And, you know, which I, which is intentional because, but I, I've, I too have been shy about, citing Deleuze and unpacking Deleuze.
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it's a tough nut to crack.
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And, so, continuing to just read across the disciplines, or To read with a sort of playful indisciplinarity to it all, you know, I think is, it's just, it's what I started today's, live stream.
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I was gonna call it a meeting.
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it's not that formal.
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I started by talking about keeping thought lively, and my thought is kept lively by reading James Baldwin and Zadie Smith fiction right now and ping -ponging between, Proust and Sally Rooney, while reading Deleuze and Frederick Jameson at the same time, you know, it gets more stimulating.
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I've never gotten to a point where I'm just like, I know this already, it's really exciting to think with others and to be stimulated by them.
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I think it is important to close the podcast on is that we've been citing a lot of westerners and I think we need to be very open as well to very inspiring people beyond the Francophones Critical theory heritage and the Northern American one and the British one.
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I think we have to, open ourselves, especially for those of us grounded in other, locations in the world.
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We have to read things from these places it's interesting because embedded within the ethos of the manifesto, for example, these are things that may not be known outside of their very own kind of cuddle.
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hence the example of Salazar, in the Philippines to write, in Filipino, because it's for by the Filipino for the Filipino, which is such a thing as a Filipino kind of identity at large.
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I think this is important to crack that kind of borders as well to engage beyond, the things that are somehow very easy to access.
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But also convince others that, over the years, there's been so many comments, right? like, how come you haven't read this? it was published.
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in English.
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I didn't speak English until I was 20, I read things in other languages, which they perhaps didn't read because it was never translated, So how do we engage different backgrounds and how do we encourage people who read in other languages to share that with us, particularly when those books haven't been translated? That's one of the challenges.
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but anyhow, we can continue, talking, right? But it's time to close this meeting as AJ called it.
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This very formal meeting.
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I mean, he's wearing a tie.
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So it's a meeting.
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absolutely.
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well, thank you so much for joining us AJ, JC.
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It's always an absolute pleasure to have you on a podcast.
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I hope you will be back.
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I hope you enjoy playing with us.
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Thank you for your contributions.
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Thank you for being with us today.
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And for those of you who are watching the live stream, thanks for joining us.
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I'm sure you missed our incredible sense of humor and our serious conversations about disasters and horses.
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So, please join us again.
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For the second episode of season 10, which will be on the 24th of March, where we will be talking about feminism and many other things, Thank you all so much, and see you in a few weeks.
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Bye! Bye!
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Hello! Welcome back everyone to Disaster is Deconstructed.
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Thanks Sonya.
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Yeah, we're back.
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I've missed the music.
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It's been ages.
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So I've been humming along.
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Oh, it's so great to be back.
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bit of dancing like me in my office.
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always dancing, in the office.
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And, we're back with season 10, Jason, season 10.
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We're still standing.
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We're still here.
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I wonder some people might have thought we've, packed it in but never no like we promised right in season one that we'll do this until we drop so far so good six years in still standing strong a bit of a gap a bit of chaos but it's really nice to be back season 10 season nine was slightly different for those of you who are following us we did two stories from two different locations the episodes were created by the researchers themselves who are doing the research if you haven't listened to season nine yet please listen to it their stories are great one from the uk one from nepal it's something that we kind of wanted to do so it was super exciting it was definitely something different and i think as we go on if we have opportunities to bring in those local stories it's a priority if anybody has ideas for future seasons just reach out to us we'd love to do more things like we did last season we're really excited about season 10 because it's aligned with A project we're working on that's close to our hearts, Ksenia, you want to talk a little bit about it? Yeah, and we're just kind of, you know, season nine was all like voices from the ground and season ten we're back on our theoretical intellectual horse with a wink to the poster that we're using today.
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Right.
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over the past year and a half, Jason, whilst we're not too busy with podcasts, we're still talking about things.
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And for those of you who have been following our work, you know that, we're really inspired in our disaster scholarship by, writings thinkings and art of people who are not disaster scholars at all, we get inspired from fiction to critical theory, you name it.
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You know, we've kind of covered it in previous, And so what we started doing, with Jason and thanks to lots of friends and comrades and scholars all around the world, we started putting together a volume.
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it's not quite real yet, but hopefully it will be real soon.
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which originally was called, it's a really cheesy name, 100 thinkers, but now Jason improved it dramatically by renaming it Contemplating Catastrophe.
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basically what we invited our friends and colleagues to do is to write us an essay about a thinker whose work they really engage with and we made it quite clear that we do not want any of the thinkers to be disaster scholars, you know, as great as their work is, as important as their work is.
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We wanted to get people to think outside of the box and engage with literature, theory, philosophy, whatever it is they want to engage with, and to write about people that.
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definitely have or should influence our thinking in disaster scholarship and practice, but maybe other people are not, aware of at all.
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so it's been super exciting, last year we've been reading and editing the, essays that we've been getting, we're now at 88 or 86.
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I think we've given up on my terrible 100, numbers.
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watch this space.
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we have really exciting plans for this selection of essays.
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But this season, season 10, is going to be built around the thinkers and the entries that we have been getting through the year.
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Thank you for watching.
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through the season, we will be talking to people who have kindly written these essays for us.
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so yeah, it's going to be super fun, right? Yeah, I'm really excited about it.
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I want to talk a bit about the structure of the year.
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and then bring in some special guests to talk about the, season and introduce it.
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What we're planning is a live stream every three weeks up through May, to get us halfway through our, idea, of themes, in the project of these 80 some essays.
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And by the way, I love the way you say essay.
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I need to start saying essay instead of essay.
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I Anyhow, I like how you say it better.
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You just completely blowed my mind, but yeah, sure, okay, let's go.
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So, we're gonna get through...
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Welcome back to Disasters Deconstructed.
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None of the conversations make any sense.
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in any case, we'll get up through May.
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About halfway through the season, and then we want you all to take a reading break for the summer.
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hopefully we'll have, some suggestions, maybe we can all read together a few things.
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Yes, please.
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Are you still enjoying the essay thing? I'm still, I'm gonna, for the rest of this episode, I'm just gonna, like, giggle quietly to myself.
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Don't mind me, you after the reading break, hopefully, we can read some things together.
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We'll come back in September for another.
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series of live streams every three weeks, through the conclusion.
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I hope, by the time we reach the end of the season, everything's published.
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that would be my hope.
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All the essays are published.
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we're really working on it.
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yeah, yeah.
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We really do appreciate everybody's contributions.
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they're incredible.
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It's been so much fun to read and comment on all these essays.
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the way we've structured the season is, an introduction and conclusion.
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But in between, we've tried to look at key areas of thought, and set up some shows with some of the authors that have contributed exploring those areas of thought.
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So, we have episodes on feminism, urbanism, anarchism, black power, Latin American and the Caribbean.
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intellectual movements in Japan and China, Philippines, and eastern philosophical traditions.
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I think that's the scope were thinking right now.
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This could change a little but I think that kinda of captures the main areas of thoughts.
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So we're excited about this and thank you all for joining us for the season.
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it'll be great and we thought we would start the season with two of our really good friends our comrades these two people were basically the first people who actually discussed the idea of this hundred thinkers Volume.
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they both encouraged us.
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So if you, think this is a terrible idea, you can blame them as much as you blame us.
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it is, our absolute pleasure, to host today JC Gaillard.
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and AJ Fazz, who I don't need any introduction, you all know them really really well, and they have both written not one but two entries for our volume because, we volunteered them to do so, Hi, JC.
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Hi, AJ.
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This is it.
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I've started, you know, swapping names now.
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Here we go.
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Welcome.
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Welcome.
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Great to have you back.
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Thank you for joining us.
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AJ, second time? This is my second time.
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I'm nowhere near the number of appearances that JC has made.
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now that I just wrote in here today, This is honestly, one of my favorite places to hang out, and I'm super happy to be here, to be invited, And I like that it's JC and I together in the same space, At least some people can...
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Now, realize that we're not the same person.
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the same person.
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But, Jason, I also feel like we should have, you know, just like, okay, you'll have to use three letters.
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There's kind of no escape.
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I could have used my normal, you know, that I side with.
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So we just all use consonants, you know, for our names.
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can start today's episode.
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Yeah.
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the whole point of today's discussion is to brainstorm why AJ uses full stops in his initials and why I don't, right? that's the purpose of the existential question.
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indeed.
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We've been trying to answer.
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It's the hazard of the vowel.
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So you don't have to deal with the vowel.
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If I don't use the full stops, then I get odd.
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And then I get addressed as odd.
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That's false.
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That's a very good point.
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Okay.
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Now that we're clear on that, shall we talk about the problem? all the hard issues right up front.
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Which has made my day, because now I have an answer.
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been wandering for years.
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When people ask me why I don't use full stops, then I don't have a vowel.
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that's an answer.
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Perfect.
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No? Sorry? Your name has a hyphen, like the full name.
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forget about the iPhones, too much.
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Okay, Jason, please move us on, otherwise we will be here for an hour.
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said, no banter.
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Yeah, no banter, not at all, we never do that on this podcast.
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We're serious.
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Serious establishment.
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Look at us.
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let's move on to talk about the horse picture.
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No, just kidding.
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As we should.
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Well, I don't know if anybody caught the reference to AJ riding into this.
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session but you may have seen the poster for the session with the horse picture we received this picture a while ago and we just can oh yes we didn't yeah we haven't received this from the original source i love this horse picture so much i just called budget sorry jc you'll have to try it really hard you know promise i'll try something that matches that okay, so let's talk about, this core, reason we had this idea in the first place, like something we talk about pretty much in every season, I think, or every time we are, in conversation, I think, Ksenia, reading outside of our, disaster studies, outside of our field, reading across different, So the whole point of this, volume that we've been working on of essays was to get people, to engage with perspectives they might not be familiar with, right? So I wanted to, start with you, AJ, just ask you how you, think about that, idea of people engaging with perspectives they're not familiar with, and then maybe personally, what do you love to read, how did you get into reading that stuff that you're reading, what's your process of finding things to challenge you intellectually? thank you for that question, I just want to say thanks again, for having me, this is one of my favorite places to hang out, and the three of you are some of my favorite people, to hang out with, so it's really, a lot of fun to be here.
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what do I read? how have I gotten started reading different things? I mean, I could set off.
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wildly and every direction to try to answer that question.
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but I think the first part, of the question about, like, sort of engaging with perspectives we're not familiar with.
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I think that this project this book, that is the topic of this season.
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I think the project and its objectives are really terrific, no matter the field, the settling of thought is boring at best, and violent and totalitarian at worst.
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I also think that one of the most important, I don't know, what you might call metafunctions of, of, of the arts, of sciences, of humanities is to keep thought lively and in play.
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and so long as we're discussing, disasters as I believe we're meant to do here.
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I think that there are real opportunities to, disrupt some seemingly settled figurations of thought and, set off in new directions.
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as for what I read, I recently in a conversation with my wife, said something like, I pointed out that she reads a lot of biographies and I don't.
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And then as soon as I finished saying that, I, rattled off a list of like 35 biographies that I'd read.
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I guess I do.
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I've got a constant rotation.
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Of, mostly philosophy, fiction, poetry, art, history.
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I do also read social science as part of my job.
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but you name it, I read, very actively and I devote a lot of time to it.
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Sometimes I pick something up, because of a recommendation.
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I was in a conversation recently with, the great Beth Marino.
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and she told me that Candace Callison's, How Climate Change Comes to Matter was her favorite ethnography of climate change.
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coming from her, I knew that meant I had to read it.
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And that happens in conversations.
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all the time.
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I've been turned on to things on this very podcast, which first got me reading, Fiola Jacobs' important work, after her appearance on the podcast.
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I can name, several other examples, both in, your written work and what I, sometimes things just come up repeatedly as references in whatever I'm reading, and that could be literary too, literary allusions and whatnots.
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I'm occasionally methodical.
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It's when I take a deep dive, which I'm doing another one right now, a deep dive on the history of liberalism.
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I'm in my fourth wave of deep dives on the concept of nature.
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but usually I'm jumping back and forth, between older and newer texts across every genre.
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Which is, it's not only just sort of fun, it often results in all kinds of serendipitous things.
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hybrid connections in my thought between, say, literature and philosophy and anthropology.
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Thank you so much for sharing.
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And, J .C.,
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I want to ask you kind of the same question.
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How do you approach this question of the importance of, reading broadly? And what's your...
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how did you get to it? Thanks, Jason.
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I think the, if there's one commonality with what, AJ said, Would be probably eclecticism.
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I like to read very diverse stuff.
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probably more academic than AJ, because I think you've got a wider range than I have.
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to me, if, I'm trying to think of why I've started to read, beyond disaster studies is, What I call my frustration with the field, which came out of practice more than academia and how I couldn't find the answers to the challenges I was facing.
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Facing the field as a practitioner.
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I couldn't find the answers to the issues I was facing and I had to go beyond disaster studies to engage with some more insightful, literature that was bringing me new ideas.
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And that's how I started to read Foucault, for example, 13, 14 years ago, and opening up into a whole range of new critical theory, thinkers.
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I would say that I read Foucault.
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First and foremost stuff outside of disaster studies.
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Although I'm super excited about my latest, acquisition.
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it's on top of my, reading list now.
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I just got it two days ago.
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Finally.
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I love that book.
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It's great.
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Oh my goodness.
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perfect timing.
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But is it signed? That's the question.
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It's a sign, yeah.
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Because I have a signed copy.
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Shocking.
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Okay, I Enough self -promotion.
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I would read, I think on my desk at the moment at home, I've got some stuff on Orientalism in the arts.
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I've got stuff from, Asian, critical thinkers, not very well known in the West.
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I've got, stuff by Foucault, I think.
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and I've got a few other stuff from, Philippine studies.
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In English and in Filipino as well.
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So I think, it's more about being curious.
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disaster studies as a field provides a nice, platform for engaging with diverse eclectic literature because you can touch upon so many different things.
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over the past 15 years, I got into the digital agenda on the arts, on this ability, on, all sorts of philosophical schools of thought.
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Because of the things I was encountering in the field.
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I think our field is very well placed to stimulate that kind of engagement.
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with diverse sets of literature.
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that gives me a really nice segue to my next question.
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And I will start with you JC kind of or continue with you and you know, for both of you, for, for for you, AJ, and for you JC, your scholarship's kind of very much outside of the like normative disaster studies, you both have really been pushing the boundaries of how we kind of do disaster side is how we think about virus concepts and various practices.
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So what inspires you and your work, JC, you started alluding a little bit to this, but can you tell us a little more about your inspirations? why do you care so much? But I think when I was, Trying to impose, such normative concepts as vulnerability capacities, within very standardized, framework for reducing the risk of disasters.
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I was not, getting the response I was expecting from the people I was working with, because the concept didn't make sense.
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I had to understand why these concepts didn't make sense.
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I used to be very much, enclosed into my disaster studies silo.
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back in the two thousands, and I realized that I had to, I had to go to be in that if I wanted to understand why, because the literature on disasters was kind of going in circle.
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and I had to go beyond that.
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first I returned To the classics of the 1970s, our own kind of mentors, who, used to cite and refer to, think as much beyond disaster studies.
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And actually, if you look at what Ben Wiesner, Phil O and all these guys were citing in the 1970s, there were very, very few stuff that we would label disaster studies nowadays.
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the first turning point, Was how they managed to, change the field by introducing the concept of vulnerability as a prompt, not as a silver bullet meant to be rolled out all over the world.
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looking back at what they did and how they came up with something new was an inspiration for reading outside of the field.
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At the time, they were reading, a lot of Marxist stuff.
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either orthodox or less orthodox.
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they were reading a lot of Althusser, Balibar and those kind of things as well in the 1970s.
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But, I mean, that was a source of inspiration, back then for me.
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back then, it's kind of 15, 13 years ago.
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Super, thanks JC.
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AJ, same question to you, why are you trying to challenge us all and, make us think it could be so easy, I want to begin with a commercial.
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for, one of my favorite recent books.
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JC Gayle, The Invention of Disaster.
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had so much flattery in my life.
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which was really interesting, and I think it is relevant to how I'd like to answer this question.
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while JC and I, know each other, never in person, though, only in virtual spaces, we've known each other's work for quite some time, his book came out just as I was finishing my last book, I think it was the two of you, Jason and Ksenia, who pointed out some of the parallel directions that we had gone into in our work, independently of one another.
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but I think we had very similar experiences, I really relate a lot with what J .C.
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just said, because I'd say that I'm inspired by thinking with others, and I think that preposition of with is really important, of thinking with worlds, like, unfolding around myself and others.
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I made a bit of an issue in my last book about the core disasters.
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argument, which is really sort of an older political ecological argument about no natural disasters I continue to try and, trouble this in my work and don't get me wrong.
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I mean, I think it's a really important argument that belongs in our conversation, but much like JC, my first problem was that it doesn't play very well with a lot of others, such as my friends in Penipe, who regard the volcano Tungurahua as grandmother and recognize a range of kinship relations with the landscape and other species that, very much in society might otherwise be relegated to, quote, unquote, nature.
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So I'm concerned that this argument leaves the nature culture binary, of the enlightenment and even the anti -enlightenment sort of romanticism, wholly undisturbed.
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And so what inspires me is thought and praxis that, like, disrupts these and other related conventions of thought and the types of relationalities they engender.
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I don't want some rigid argument for, what is.
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nor some totalitarian imposition of categories and binaries that would silence my friends in Penipe before they ever have a chance to speak, right? I want to think with them about worlds unfolding, coming into being, and to think with them in the species and waters they course across the landscape, I'm inspired by, folks like all of you and others who keep the courses of coming and going alive, who are deeply curious about the world as much as they are deeply unsettled by power and inequality.
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how can we take on power and inequality if we restrict ourselves to the terms, dictated by these rules? So I could go on.
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I'll leave it there.
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great.
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Yeah, so, I wanna move to talk a little bit more about what you both wrote, in your essays for this collection.
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And, just sticking with you, A .J.,
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you wrote, about Santiago Castro Gómez and Antonio Gramsci.
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I know there was, a bit of a fight about who would get Gramsci.
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I know Tony Oliver Smith was interested.
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But, you got in there first, AJ, why did you, come back to us and suggest these thinkers, as you engaged with their work and came up with these manuscripts for us.
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What do you think disaster scholars need to know? why should disaster scholars be engaging with their work? what were you hoping readers would get out of that? Well, excellent question.
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it's impossible to answer in a limited amount of time, but I'll do what I can.
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I didn't realize that there was so much competition.
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For what it's worth, I think I lost out on Foucault to JC, but I'm very glad that he's in his capable hands.
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I imagine there was a lot of competition for those two thinkers.
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let me start, If I can with Gramsci, and the, I think, two primary reasons, well, each of my reasons is like nine reasons in a trench coat, but the, the, the two main reasons that, that he's really important to me, first is that while I had read plenty of philosophy.
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Gramsci was the first theorist I read seriously once I really committed to a career in social science.
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this was before I got into the, disaster space, but somewhere around my senior year of undergraduate and my early master's studies.
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I was starting to read, Foucault, Fanon, Bourdieu, and others at the time as challenging as the prison notebooks are to read, I found Gramsci to be a really good partner for working through some of the most basic problems that affected my thought at the time.
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Gramsci was really trying to overcome the structural functionalism of the scientific Marxism that was ascendant at his time, which was this Billiard ball theory of the world and to make sense of the formation of like social, cultural, political thoughts, subjectivity and praxis and, differently assembled capitalist, societies, this, this weird sort of spaces that Italy was at the time, especially his notion of hegemony as a question, not an answer.
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About the soft formation of power for me, was and remains fascinating.
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his attention to literature and the arts in a way that didn't dismiss them as somehow, epiphenomenal to material conditions.
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And his framework of the historical block, all in a way, prefigure.
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at least how I handle this domain of thought and practice, and this perpetual sort of becoming of entanglements of multiplicity, I think it's an important sort of bridging line of thought for students of, social science.
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it wasn't just me, but I see my own students.
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year after year, coming to social science, looking for something like laws or objective principles governing human behavior and systems, much as I once did, Gramsci is a sort of an excellent example of that.
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I think gateway to thinking beyond such state like rigidities of thought.
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if I could say something This is simply also about santiago castro gomez's very important work I think he became important for me.
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as a latin american theorist Who worked to conduct critical examinations of the present, he's inspired quite a bit by Foucault himself, without locating the machinations of power and knowledge outside of Latin America and the global south, his genealogical approach to Latin American thought and society, really envisions as its object, not one logic and system of power driving history, but many that might be operating at the time of any encounter and which are transformed by encounters.
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He wants to think with and not just about and so I found myself inspired by his abandonment of both historicist and humanist figures of thought in favor of attention to particular relations and discourses as ontologically prior to anything, like generalizable humanity, I'm taken with his skepticism of logocentrism, enlightenment concepts, nature and human nature, and again, thinking, with others from, embedded positions on the peripheries of global systems that are hardly territorialized Super.
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I didn't know about Santiago Castro Gomez before you mentioned his work to us, So I think that's the beauty of this volume there were quite a few thinkers that both Jason and I were like, Oh, we don't know who those people are.
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Like, why don't we know? thanks for bringing that in.
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It's fantastic, to really get through that.
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us all thinking about this work that doesn't quite circulate in the disciplines that we are working on jesse same question to you The two entries for us, and I remember you and I were sitting in British Library, and talking about this, right, I think I asked you to write about Glissant, and you said I'd rather write about Foucault.
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But then I bought you another beetroot latte and you agreed to write about the song as well.
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that's how it, you know, just little bribery goes a long way, isn't it? beetroot on this podcast, please.
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That's an object of banter.
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Yeah, this never gets old, JC's love for beetroot.
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But anyhow, you were the first person to submit the entry, so I wish I had a star, but here's the imaginary star.
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I'll get you another.
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I'm the last to read that book, Okay, so the star just kind of got cancelled.
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But anyway, beetroot latte is on me, or chai, or whatever.
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You want a surprise.
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remember well, you, you're suggesting that I would do, I would do Glissant in the first place and my issue I remember was legitimacy.
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I wanted someone, and this is why I wanted Foucault because I wanted to do a francophone, thing.
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Someone I would be able to read in their original language.
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And I think for me it was important.
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I've never read Fukui in English, I'm not sure how it's translated.
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But, I think to me it was important.
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That's why I suggested a few people from Southeast Asia as well, especially Salazar, whom I know and work with his thoughts quite a lot at the moment, I think they are more legitimate people to do sell as a, for example.
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so I think for me it was, somehow much more pragmatic answer than, ages fantastic kind of theoretical and inspirational kind of, decision for me.
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It was a pragmatic, Choice.
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I knew I didn't want to do Bourdieu, I didn't want to do, I can't do Deleuze, it's too much for me.
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so, oh, I'm not yet there, probably.
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So, yeah, I mean, I think, I think, Foucault was an obvious choice in the sense that he was probably one of the first, Critical thinkers I deeply engage with for my own work to inform my own work originally the key entry point was the idea of norms.
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Because I was concerned by how normative our field is and how it doesn't match, our experiences in the field.
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I was trying to find out why are we so normative? why are we trying to, standardize people's behavior? Foucault was an obvious entry point to understand that beyond, disaster studies.
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And then from them, it's easy to branch out into his own inspirations.
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I love, Canguillem and I wanted to do Canguillem as well.
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I'm not sure if you have Canguillem in the end.
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if you want to do a third entry, now is your chance.
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Too many French philosophers.
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I think we need to diversify the entries.
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And this is why I love the idea at the start.
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Yeah.
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So it was an easy way to branch out into so many different things, both francophone and anglophone.
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but I think that was, again, a very pragmatic, practical, challenge for me that, drew me into these more, theoretical stuff.
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I've come to, so I think I was, and I used to be labeled and, and I think I still.
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I'm labeled a sort of applied geographer by many with all the baggages it carries, I think we did.
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But, yeah, I was very much in that space 20 years ago.
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And I think now I've come to think that, without trying to, paraphrase Lenin, I strongly believe that theory liberates, practice.
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I think the solution to our, practical challenges.
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As practitioners, as policy makers, we all come from more theory and not more practice -driven or, Applied, objectives in our research.
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I strongly believe that.
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I'm not sure how you feel about this, AJ, but to me, the solution is in more theory.
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I couldn't agree with you more on that.
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It'll definitely sound absurd, to some ears, but, I think my last, contribution to the Journal of Disaster Studies was precisely on this topic, right? seemingly pure of heart and pure of practice and, you know, theoretically, Well, I can't quite say ill -informed.
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I mean, I was engaged, and then I just didn't realize, I think some of them used the word metafunctions.
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of the types of theory and concepts, that I was reading, right? I find that I constantly, have to work through stuff theoretically I apologize for it less now, than I once did.
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I say this to my students You need to realize, you'll use a key word or concept, whether it's culture or vulnerability and you have to attune yourself to, the multiplicity of meanings that might have when you're in a conversation with, you know, any type of, a group that has even the slightest bit of diversity to it.
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I also think that, theory, that concepts, Can help do the work of solidarity by putting the disparate cases in context that we work in, like in conversation with one another, right? That's why we can have a meaningful conversation in this space right now.
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even though the particulars are entirely different.
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So we want to blow up the concepts.
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We want to place pressure on these concepts at the end of the day when it comes down to actually making sense of real cases and context.
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But I also think it does the work of solidarity by storing our work together.
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But I think our responsibility now probably is to, share whether it's inviting or in such things as podcast, but it's to share how, theories has helped us.
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In changing the way we approach, field work, whether it's from an academic perspective or from a practitioner's perspective.
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my work with, our NGO CDP in the Philippines, for example, or other local partners in the Philippines has changed since I have engaged with critical theory.
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it has changed and I hope for the better.
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So it's not something limited to my own office and academic writing.
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it has helped me better, deal with practical problems on the ground.
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I think we need to share that because people need to engage with further theory.
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and I think we are going in the right direction because you are.
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I've got, a special guest, in Oakland at the moment, Ricardo Fuente Alba, who many of you, know personally.
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we had a long chat yesterday with Ricardo about how the new generation of, researchers in our field of disaster studies has been informed by the work of critical, theories and how they are game changers in our field.
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I said that it was back then, inspiration for me to write the invention of disasters because there was a momentum towards more theory in our field.
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but these guys, this new generation of early care researchers.
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They are, the game changers because they started with critical theory.
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I like you AJ, but I'm just trying to play catch up, trying to read, back what stuff that I should have Right back in the, in, in my undergraduate years, back in the 1990s, you read Gramsci in your senior undergrad years.
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I read Gramsci, 10 years ago, AJ.
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So, I'm playing catcher, but this new generation of, of researchers is the new hope because they have that embedded in their own scholarship from the very start.
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And we need to spread that word.
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we need to encourage them.
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We need to show how this is important and how this has a critical, practical impact.
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I love that, JC and we're running at about 10 minutes left.
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So, I want to bring this back to the fact that we have this collection coming up of, essays that have the potential to introduce, students, researchers, People who just like to read about, disaster.
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Lots of different people to, different, entry points, you know? Different ways of thinking about disasters, about risk, about society.
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So, what do you think the potential there is? how can this exposure to all these different, entry points change our field, change the field of disaster scholarship.
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what is your hope for this kind of work? JC, maybe first of all, and then AJ.
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I think eclecticism is very important.
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And it's something super exciting in our field.
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It's very easy for us to read very diverse stuff.
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And I personally, I like multitasking.
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I like doing different things every day.
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I like reading different things within the same day as well.
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it's how you take a step back from what you're doing at the same time as learn new things that will inform back this thing that you're doing.
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and I think the more eclecticism, the more diversity in the field.
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And there are so many other threads of theory that we haven't explored yet out of the 88 thinkers you've come up with in the book so far, how many have really been used in our film? maybe not half of them.
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and I would say if one of us, the DD community and the, and the manifesto community at large, we take one thinker and we take it to, studying one dimension of what we call disasters.
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I mean, we may take the field much forward by highlighting things we have possibly not thought of so far.
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I think what's interesting, JC, is that, almost every person who wrote an entry, is inspired by the thinker they wrote about.
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if it's one person in our community that has, really engaged with a thinker, and inspired disaster scholarship that doesn't necessarily register for anybody else, maybe except that one researcher, right? So that's a really tricky thing.
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it's like we are coming from all such different backgrounds and traditions, you know, and so there might be a thinker that has really shaped the thought of one of our colleagues and we don't even know about it, right? We need to be open to new things.
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And as something we discussed again yesterday with Ricardo, I mean, it's probably easier for us who are a bit later in our career, who can take risk, who can take the time to read a bit more than early career researchers who have to deliver, after the expectations of the academia.
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so we need to create that space for them to be able to read and to be.
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As curious as they want to be, I know Journal of Justice Studies is trying to do this as well, but, I'm not sure all journals would accept, a paper framed after, something Belusian or something, Salazarian.
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I think we need to create that space as well so that they have the opportunity to take the risk, which is all benefits to win, win for everyone.
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that was great.
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yeah, I'm right with you on all of that.
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You know, I was just thinking, I started, as an undergraduate when I was, 22 years old.
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Proud first -generation college student.
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I threw myself all the way into it and was already an avid reader of philosophy and literature.
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I have been...
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reading voraciously thousands of volumes since then.
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that was twenty years ago.
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still to this day, I'll pick up a volume, I'll read something and I'll be like, why didn't I read this first? Why couldn't I have grasped some of this stuff 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 5 years ago? why couldn't I have read JC's book before I started my last one? But I'm going to have it before I publish the sequel of The Invention, I Well, yeah, and I'm working on my own, so, yeah, we're...
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So we are competing, the first of us two who is going to publish the sequel of our books.
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my goodness.
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Right.
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But mine's going to be distributed on the Pony Express.
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I We're going to ride out at dawn and that's likely because they're going to dismantle the postal service in the United States.
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the pony will be our only, No, but I think it is, it's, you know, I mean, I, you, you, you know, you mentioned Deleuze before other people, like, just sometimes we start to appreciate thinkers by how they're handled by others.
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I mean, anybody listening carefully to everything I just said about Gramsci and, Castro Gomez will hear very Deleuzian language.
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And, you know, which I, which is intentional because, but I, I've, I too have been shy about, citing Deleuze and unpacking Deleuze.
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it's a tough nut to crack.
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And, so, continuing to just read across the disciplines, or To read with a sort of playful indisciplinarity to it all, you know, I think is, it's just, it's what I started today's, live stream.
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I was gonna call it a meeting.
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it's not that formal.
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I started by talking about keeping thought lively, and my thought is kept lively by reading James Baldwin and Zadie Smith fiction right now and ping -ponging between, Proust and Sally Rooney, while reading Deleuze and Frederick Jameson at the same time, you know, it gets more stimulating.
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I've never gotten to a point where I'm just like, I know this already, it's really exciting to think with others and to be stimulated by them.
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I think it is important to close the podcast on is that we've been citing a lot of westerners and I think we need to be very open as well to very inspiring people beyond the Francophones Critical theory heritage and the Northern American one and the British one.
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I think we have to, open ourselves, especially for those of us grounded in other, locations in the world.
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We have to read things from these places it's interesting because embedded within the ethos of the manifesto, for example, these are things that may not be known outside of their very own kind of cuddle.
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hence the example of Salazar, in the Philippines to write, in Filipino, because it's for by the Filipino for the Filipino, which is such a thing as a Filipino kind of identity at large.
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I think this is important to crack that kind of borders as well to engage beyond, the things that are somehow very easy to access.
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But also convince others that, over the years, there's been so many comments, right? like, how come you haven't read this? it was published.
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in English.
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I didn't speak English until I was 20, I read things in other languages, which they perhaps didn't read because it was never translated, So how do we engage different backgrounds and how do we encourage people who read in other languages to share that with us, particularly when those books haven't been translated? That's one of the challenges.
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but anyhow, we can continue, talking, right? But it's time to close this meeting as AJ called it.
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This very formal meeting.
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I mean, he's wearing a tie.
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So it's a meeting.
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absolutely.
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well, thank you so much for joining us AJ, JC.
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It's always an absolute pleasure to have you on a podcast.
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I hope you will be back.
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I hope you enjoy playing with us.
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Thank you for your contributions.
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Thank you for being with us today.
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And for those of you who are watching the live stream, thanks for joining us.
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I'm sure you missed our incredible sense of humor and our serious conversations about disasters and horses.
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So, please join us again.
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For the second episode of season 10, which will be on the 24th of March, where we will be talking about feminism and many other things, Thank you all so much, and see you in a few weeks.
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Bye! Bye!
