Hypothetical Earthquake on an Empirical Border: Building a Seismic Scenario in the USA and Mexico

• In Event: Practicing Epistemologies: Knowledge Work in Everyday Environmental Management and Governance

Abstract

Since 2015, a bi-national and interdisciplinary volunteer team supported by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) has been compiling and analyzing data from San Diego and Tijuana. Their goal: an Earthquake Scenario that treats the two entangled cities at once, that will facilitate updates dependent risk management tools at city and regional levels and stimulate new popular awareness of seismic hazard. Scenarios have been well-documented in STS scholarship for good reason. Lakoff (2008) suggests that scenarios should be understood as exemplary of certain contemporary national security rationalities and Wodak and Neale (2015) point out that this method to articulate and analyze possible futures is becoming ubiquitous in environmental policy work.

In this paper, I draw on nearly three years of observation related to the development of this scenario to consider it as more than a way of enacting security logics or figuring the credible future. I demonstrate how the EERI team has created and mobilized both existing knowledge about the material conditions of geologies and the built environment and institutional knowledge about potential data users that at once engage and refuse themes of national territory. I argue that attending to when and how the US-Mexico border emerges in the work and reflections of key participants can not only help us understand the knowledge work related to environmental risk mitigation, but can also support the development of new and vital questions related to the ordinary practices of environmental data production, analysis, and communication.

Referenced:
Lakoff, A. 2008. “The Generic Threat, or How We Became Unprepared.” Cultural Anthropology 23(3): 399–428.
Wodak, J, and T Neale. 2015. “A Critical Review of the Application of Environmental Scenario Exercises.” Futures 73: 176–86.

Author

• Elizabeth A. Reddy, Colorado School Of Mines