About this Journal

Critical Disaster Studies is the flagship journal of the Disasters, Displacement, and Human Rights Program in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 

Critical Disaster Studies seeks to explore and outline the contours of a critically grounded anthropological approach to the study of disasters. Scholarship under the broad rubric of disaster studies has moved over the last few years beyond examining the interplay of natural hazards and human social conditions in shaping disasters, into new terrains examining linkages and continuities via frameworks such as vulnerability, resilience, risk and adaptation. Some recent studies foreground the workings of neoliberalism in the production of vulnerability, while others focus attention on the continuities of racial, class and gender inequalities in placing historically marginalized populations at the receiving end of both disasters as well as strategies of recovery. We invite contributions that seek to break new ground in productively linking concerns with risk, vulnerability, resilience, and recovery, and ongoing analyses of exploitation, resistance and revolutionary possibility.