Sticking Out and Raising Voices: Race, Gender, and Geographies of Harm in Social Movements after Disasters

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Geographies

Abstract

In repositioning disasters as social, rather than “natural” events, sociologists of disasters and environmental justice scholar-activists have long documented how structural inequality and disasters mutually compound the material suffering of marginalized populations across the globe. Examples like Covid-19, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11 have illuminated the connections between disasters, racist backlash, and anti-racist social movements. Yet sociologists continue to struggle for a holistic understanding of how disasters influence cultural and political responses to social inequality. Moreover, most sociological theorization of disaster and social justice tend to be limited in their engagement with intersectionality—even despite rich insights from feminist geography and science and technology studies. This paper intervenes in this gap by proposing the concept of post-disaster citizenship, which I define as the processes by which activists, institutions, and other political actors use disasters to redefine the terms of social, cultural, and political membership. My paper explores the meanings of disaster as an ethnographic object that can illuminate how people talk about and make sense of their social worlds. I show how assumptions that disasters are urgent, exceptional, and impermanent can lead to activists from dominant groups rationalizing strategies that sideline the histories, perspectives, and labor of minoritized racial and ethnic groups, women, and queer people. My conceptualization draws upon thirty-six months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2014 and 2018 in the Japanese cities of Tokyo, Kawasaki, and Osaka, during which time followed a nationwide antiracist movement against hate speech that emerged in the years after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. I explain why activists understood disaster as a compelling cultural frame for mobilization and how their focus on disaster shaped their methods of organizing, their construction of community, and their relationships with other activist groups.

Author

• Vivian Shaw, Loyola University Maryland