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The book provides insights into community narratives concerning life in the face of creeping calamities through a case study from the Colombian Andes. It sets out to make sense of the lived experience of disasters that are slowly unfolding as well disasters that have not yet occurred.
This book explores what it means to live in anticipation of disaster and in anticipation of an uprooting of community, sense of self, and sense of belonging. It questions whether community resilience is a useful concept in the context of slow-onset geological hazards for which few viable solutions are available. The book forces us to think about how resettlement and displacement functions in the context of slow calamities, which presents distinct challenges, mainly related to lower political saliency than what is usually the case in emergencies. The book thus also has implications for how we think about the adverse impacts of climate change. By raising new questions on the nature of disasters and calamities and how we experience them, the book explores the challenges and tensions surrounding governance and governmentality.
The interdisciplinary blend of practice-oriented and conceptual reflections will appeal to academics in postgraduate and postdoctoral research in social sciences, specifically, disaster research, geography, and research fields centred on natural hazards and disasters.
List of contents
Foreword by JC Gaillard Part 1: Context 1. Introduction: life in anticipation of slow calamity 2. Aponte: political, geographical and community context 3. The phenomenon: the natural hazard and its characteristics: some reflections Part 2: Experiencing slow calamity 4. Making sense of the hazard: interpretations of the phenomenon 5. Living with a slow calamity: disruption and continuity in the face of creeping destruction 6. The ancestral land: territory, community and resettlement Part 3: Reflections 7. Living in anticipation of impending calamity: towards an analytical notion 8. Concluding reflections
About the author
Reidar Staupe-Delgado is an Associate Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellow (MSCA-IF) at Roskilde University, Denmark. His research interests revolve around disasters, health emergencies and broader social problems, with a particular focus on slowly manifesting disasters.
Summary
The book provides insights into community narratives concerning life in the face of creeping calamities through a case study from the Colombian Andes. It sets out to make sense of the lived experience of disasters that are slowly unfolding as well disasters that have not yet occurred.
