S10E11 - Interdisciplinary Approaches and Hope for Disaster Studies

Episode overview

The Season 10 finale welcomes disaster anthropologist Susanna Hoffman, who wrote the preface to the hosts' forthcoming edited volume, Contemplating Catastrophe. Drawing on a career spanning cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and literature, the episode reflects on the depth of culture in disaster studies, the limits of narrow disciplinary silos, and what the field needs to move from fragmented case studies toward broader theoretical and policy impact.

Hosts

• Jason von Meding
• Ksenia Chmutina

Guest

• Susanna Hoffman — disaster anthropologist; author, co-author, and editor of 13 books and over 40 articles and chapters; founder of the Risk and Disaster Thematic Interest Group, Society for Applied Anthropology; chair, Commission on Risk and Disasters, International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences

Key themes

• Cultural anthropology as a broad, integrative discipline
• The depth of culture: perception, place attachment, and "topoculture"
• Isolation, displacement, and the study of disrupted communities
• The limits of induction without deduction in disaster scholarship
• Interdisciplinarity versus disciplinary silos
• Getting disaster scholarship into policy
• Storytelling and teaching beyond the academy
• Hope through broader teaching and generational change

Core discussion highlights

• Susanna Hoffman traces her intellectual formation across cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology and archaeology, arguing that understanding disaster requires the full depth of a culture's history, perception, and meaning-making — not just its visible customs.
• Hoffman discusses her forthcoming books, including In Placement (on cultural isolation during COVID-19) and Nostalgia, Ecologia, Topoculture (on the deep, sensory, and emotional dimensions of place attachment that make resettlement after displacement so difficult).
• Reflecting on decades of writing across cookbooks, relationship guides, and academic ethnography, Hoffman argues that storytelling is essential to reaching audiences outside the academy, and that community knowledge — especially from "local voices" like grandmothers and farmers — matters as much as expert authority.
• Hoffman critiques the field's overreliance on induction and case-specific studies, calling for a return to overarching, generalizable concepts (citing Kenneth Hewitt's concept of vulnerability) that can connect individual disasters into a shared theoretical and political framework.
• The conversation names the "reinvention of the wheel" as a recurring failure in disaster and climate scholarship, where fields ignore decades of existing literature by refusing to read across disciplines.
• Hoffman argues that disaster scholarship must move further into policy — engaging figures in government and international institutions — while retaining the interdisciplinary, culturally grounded depth that anthropology provides.
• The episode closes the season on a note of hope grounded in broader teaching across disciplines and generations, with Hoffman pointing to younger audiences as a key lever for cultural and political change.