Disasters in and of the Middle East: Event, place, intensity
About
What is disaster? What is this present moment if not a time of disasters?
Identifying the omnipresent and omnivorous presence of "our presentism" in 2015, François Hartog wrote, "Not to forget a further aspect of our present: that the future is perceived as a threat not a promise. The future is a time of disasters, and ones we have, moreover, brought upon ourselves" (Hartog 2015, xviii).
Different writers have been pinpointing and/or offering existing and potential ways of conceiving the present and the future (Koselleck 1979, 2002; Berlant 2011; Horn 2018). "The shock of a closed future" (Furet 1995) is both the anticipation of the future and the experience of the present as a time of disasters: an experience of the present as saturated with the future, as a "noneventful intensity" (Povinelli 2021) that challenges the 'enlightened' and capitalist conception of progressive time.
In this day and age, is it still possible to think of disasters as superlative events, or are they events at all? For whom are they noneventful and for whom are they still experienced as shocks and ruptures? If they are no longer significant events, what to make of the landscape, trauma, pain, and/or avenues of desirable change that disasters often generate? How to deal, then, with disasters past and present?
Within disaster discourse, the Middle East is rarely the focus for discussions of changing environments, or diverse responses to superlative events. Nevertheless, the region has been the site of earthquakes, famine, flood, wars and conflicts, genocides, massacres, as well as other environmental, industrial, and technological catastrophes. To that end, the Disaster Studies Initiative at Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to announce a 2-day conference to center the region in scholarly discourse on disasters.
Drawing on critical disaster studies, we reject both the binary between 'natural' and 'unnatural' disasters, and the confinement of disaster studies to the field of disaster and risk management and public health. We aim to highlight the enmeshed social, political and environmental factors that undergird disasters in the Middle East. We hope to bring together locally relevant insights to the ongoing global inquiry on disaster, which is currently dominated by climate change exceptionalism that obscures (past and present) disasters in the Middle East, the Global South and the Indigenous geographies of the Global North.
We are interested in papers that engage the following questions and themes:
Relevant questions:
- What is disaster and is it / can it be a politically and/or theoretically relevant concept?
- For whom/which communities is disaster still an exceptional experience and for whom is it no longer politically/environmentally/socially significant?
- In what ways can a Middle Eastern orientation disrupt accepted conventions in Disaster Studies?
- What does the 'spectacle of disaster' reveal or obscure about its preconditions? Wherein lies its appeal to observers, historically or today? What do we gain and/or lose by "event-izing" disaster? What other counter-concepts can be introduced in discussions of disasters?
Potential themes:
- Disaster imperialism in the Middle East
- Intersections of "natural" disaster & war (e.g, conflict ecology, compound crises)
- Disaster, disability and debility
- Disaster and work/labor
- Historical approaches to disaster management
- Disaster vis-à-vis the projects of Enlightenment and modernity
- Ruination and memory
- Disasters, nonhuman beings and the more-than-human experiences
Submission details and timeline
All scholars across fields are welcome to apply, though we particularly encourage scholars currently working at universities in the Middle East / SWANA region.
June 30: Deadline to submit abstracts (250-500 words, text only) and short bio.
Please submit abstracts or any additional questions to: disasterstudies@fas.harvard.edu
July 15: Notification of accepted papers