2. Acts of God, Man, and System: Knowledge, Technology, and the Construction of Disaster

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Introduction
4. Introducing Critical Disaster Studies 1
5. Part I. Knowing Disaster
6. 1. The Voyage of the Paragon: Disaster as Method 11
7. 2. Acts of God, Man, and System: Knowledge, Technology, and the Construction of Disaster 32
8. 3. When Does a Crisis Begin? Race, Gender, and the Subprime Noncrisis of the Late 1990s 51
9. Part II. Governing Disaster
10. 4. Concrete Kleptocracy and Haiti’s Culture of Building: Toward a New Temporality of Disaster 71
11. 5. Risk Technopolitics in Freetown Slums: Why Community- Based Disaster Management Is No Silver Bullet 85
12. 6. Spaces at Risk: Urban Politics and Slum Relocation in Chennai, India 97
13. 7. Plan B: The Collapse of Public- Private Risk Sharing in the US National Flood Insurance Program 116
14. Part III. Imagining Disaster
15. 8. Mediating Disaster, or A History of the Novel 133
16. 9. The Tōkai Earthquake and Changing Lexicons of Risk 149
17. 10. Translating Disaster Knowledge from Japan to Chile: A Proposal for Incompleteness 165
18. Afterword
19. “Acts of Men”: Disasters Neglected, Preventable, and Moral 184
20. Notes 193
21. Bibliography 229
22. Index 261
23. List of Contributors 271
24. Acknowledgments 275