Disasters, Crises and Responses in the 21st Century

Session Submission Type: Created Panel

Session Description

As societies around the world face rising seas, increased extreme weather events, terrorism, and other shocks, governments struggle to mitigate and respond to these events. This panel brings together four scholars using a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to understand how states prepare for and manage crises. Mukai uses a new, blockchain based social network model to analyze data on inhabitants, local governments, universities, firms, and NGOs in disaster affected areas in Japan. This approach to capturing interactions during and after disasters can create trust - as the records cannot be altered - and help coordinate the resources at the local level. Aiken uses a mixed-methodology of discursive analysis of documents from civil society organizations, hansard, and government press releases, as well as a quantitative content analysis of print and online media to understand how the opioid crisis was defined and measured. She illuminates the back-and-forth communication between government, organizations, and the media to determine at what point an opioid crisis occurred and show what underlying assumptions there are in constructing "crisis", as well as ways that the federal government has attempted to mitigate this crisis. Roberts argues that the collection of offices, people, and traditions that constitute the national security establishment has yet to fully contend with how a more centralized homeland security law and policy should operate in a country with a tradition of separated powers in which Congress, states, cities, and the private sector play a role alongside the president. The diversity of homeland security problems and definitions makes a risk-based approach unlikely to succeed if it assumes that measuring risks will be easy or strictly quantitative. Older uses interview and documentary data from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to show how, in the absence of a national consensus about the State’s responsibility after a catastrophe, local governments and sometimes individuals constructed their own definitions of disaster governance. Decisions about the limits of the State role varied between neighboring jurisdictions. Unelected staff with no disaster experience, and sometimes volunteers, were left making decisions about who would and who wouldn’t receive assistance, while national agency staff made statements about the responsibility without basis in law or policy. Taken together, these panelists represent the mixed methods and cross disciplinary tools that will be necessary as social scientists and decision makers work to handle shocks in the 21st century.

Sub Unit

• Related Groups / Disasters and Crises

Individual Presentations

• Human Network Politics after Natural Disaster in Japan - Yoko Mukai, Kumamoto　Gakuen University

• Reconsidering Crisis: Discourse, Identity and the Opioid “Crisis” in Canada - Megan Aiken, University of Alberta

• The Partial and Contested Construction of the State’s Role in Disaster Response - Malka Older, Sciences Po Paris

Chair

• Daniel P. Aldrich Northeastern University

Discussant

• Kristin Taylor Wayne State University