Caroline Compton

As they do in situations of armed conflict, displacement, and famine humanitarian actors deliver assistance following rapid onset natural disasters. They have a clear-cut framing of such emergencies, articulated first by Craig Calhoun as the ‘emergency imaginary’, as events that break with the ordinary. Yet volumes of scholarship on disaster demonstrates the highly socially contingent nature of natural disaster events, and disaster recovery always aims to ‘build back better’. Climate change and ecological damage, which increase the frequency and severity certain disasters, further exacerbate the discontinuity between the emergency imaginary and the experience of disaster events.

 

The proposed paper discusses this disjunct, with reference to humanitarian governance, practice, and big data. It posits that the current disjunct, between the emergency imaginary and the natural disaster, faces new challenges in the future as climate change destabilizes any possibility of a return to ‘normal’. Simultaneously, the use of big data informed platforms for emergency management and preparedness disrupt present visual and temporal renderings of risk and emergency, without necessarily engaging with the underlying drivers of vulnerability. The paper demonstrates the need for a fundamental reimagining of humanitarian practice following natural disaster, a need that will only grow in coming decades.