Andrew McMahan (NYU, Dukes of Hazards Podcast) joins Jordan and Mitch to lay out how disaster response is failing us, why Audre Lorde can help us imagine it differently, and what this season of Tough Shift is all about. Plus, the word "epistemology" definitely needs a drinking game.

Learn more and buy the book at at http://www.disastersandsocialchange.org/

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(Some AI-generated info below)

Keywords

disaster policy, response, reimagining, brokenness, epistemology, knowledge systems, solidarity, social movements, positive social change, disasters, community, response, social change, positive change, epistemology, equity

Takeaways

• Disasters reveal the brokenness of society and the need for change in disaster policy and response.
• Epistemology plays a crucial role in understanding disasters and how our current knowledge systems can hinder progress.
• Solidarity and social movements are essential for shaping positive social change during disasters.
• The Tough Shift podcast aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of disasters and offer practical solutions for a better future. Inappropriate responses to disasters can weaken communities and lead to the breakdown of society.
• Disasters have the potential to bring about positive social change if they prompt the formation of new communities and coalitions.
• Changing the epistemological structures and tools that guide disaster response and recovery is crucial for more inclusive and equitable outcomes.
• Disaster response and recovery should focus on strengthening communities and allowing for new futures to be imagined.

Titles

• Reimagining Disaster Policy and Response
• The Role of Epistemology in Disaster Understanding The Impact of Inappropriate Responses to Disasters on Communities
• The Potential for Positive Social Change in the Aftermath of Disasters

Sound Bites

• "This season on Tough Shift, we're gonna do something different."
• "We've got to throw out maybe 300 years of disaster thinking."
• "The way we understand disasters is part of the problem."
• "If they weren't culturally appropriate, if they didn't focus on this question of strengthening the community, right? Bringing everybody together, which they never did because federal resources aren't incentivized to do that, right? The community would break apart a little more."
• "We were motivated to answer was this question of sort of like, okay, it does seem like there's general agreement that disasters produce social change. It seems like sometimes, there's sort of, there's this story that they produce positive social change."
• "What disasters do is they sort of reveal the skeleton that's holding everything up the rest of the time."

Chapters

00:00

Introduction and Personal Experiences with Disasters

05:23

Examining Disaster Policy

01:04:42

Analyzing the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake

01:06:09

Solidarity and Social Movements in the COVID-19 Pandemic

01:06:34

Reimagining Disaster: A Shift in Perception

01:06:42

Practical Approaches to Handling Disasters

01:07:05

Ending Tough Shift vHigh.mp4

Do you remember this moment in 2020? What? That's just my summer of 2020 noise. That's my despair at the summer of 2020 noise. Do you remember the summer of 2020? What? You didn't make the noise. don't know what to do. It's going to go differently every time you do it. That's the nature of live recording. OK.

the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed picking up on the racial disparities and the pandemic itself. Yeah. And there was the attempted kidnapping and assassination of Gretchen Whitmer. That's a greatest hit. And plus all the counter -protest, Operation Gridlock, all the economic harms that were being suffered by people across the political spectrum. Right. Especially the government's lack of any kind of planning for or protection for caregiving laborers, the highly visible exploitation

And it's always kind of like that. mean, this is my thing, you know, having gone through a lot of these disasters to a greater or lesser extent, there's always some guy in a suit and a microphone saying, let's build back or even let's build back better. And then there are a lot of survivors who are standing there saying, like civil rights leaders said during COVID, we can't go back. You know, we don't want to go back to normal. We died in normal. Normal was killing us. The way of life in normal was discriminatory. It was oppressive. It was beating us down six ways to Sunday.

But yeah, our disaster response always pulls us back. And so this happens in a lot of disasters, but I think it's particularly apparent in COVID because of the way that the COVID -19 pandemic affected all of us. And so it produced this of widespread awareness of this kind of brokenness, right? Yeah. And I think it showed

how ridiculous in some ways our disaster policy is. I have kind of a rant about this, right? This is one of the, this is where a lot of the energy for this came from for me. You know, at this point, all of us, everybody listening to this podcast has been through some shit over the past few years, disaster wise, whether it's COVID or these massive heat waves or wildfires, you know, massive, massive storms and rainfall that are happening. And if you're out there and you feel like it's breaking us as a society, we think you're right. You know, we

done enough work on this before COVID, starting with the Haiti earthquake, you know, a dozen years ago, to know that how you handle disasters can fracture you, can make everything much worse than it was before, if you don't fix these problems that are revealed in it. And I don't mean we have to get better at how we handle disasters. I don't mean more like preparedness trainings or fucking go kits or something. mean, way we handle disasters is actively harming our society. We've got to change

It sounds like you're saying the way that we understand disasters is harming our society. Yeah, yeah. The way we think of disasters as we had a good solid society and then it broke and we've got to build it back is wrong. And it's really been an American or a neo -enlightenment phenomenon in the last couple hundred years. We've got to throw out that thinking because otherwise this century of disasters where we're getting hit time after time after time is going to break us

And that's it. Congratulations. It's depressing, but that's what this podcast is about. So this season on Tough Shift, we are going to talk about what it means to reimagine what we think a disaster is and how we handle them. We're going to wrestle with these questions with philosophers, emergency managers, practitioners, and disaster scholars. Maybe we'll convince you, maybe we won't, but we're pretty clear that this is the problem that we have to solve.

in this first episode, we're bringing back an old friend, my co -duke, Andrew McMahan, now at NYU, to sort of talk us through it and lay some groundwork for a season. And every episode, we're going to tell a little bit of the story. Piece by piece, we're going to try to fit it together. And I hope you'll come with us on this crazy, depressing, but ultimately, we think hopeful journey.

No, I started recording. you did? Yeah, yeah. It's happening. All nice. Didn't know it was that. Here we are. Is that a drink from Yael's wedding? It is not. Is the jar from your wedding? The jar is from our wedding. We do still have a bottle of that stuff in there. Yeah, we still got the corn whiskey. The corn whiskey from Georgia. What's astonishing is that at no point in the pandemic did Mitch and I think.

This is the time to break out. If that wasn't the time to break out corn whiskey. I'm sorry. Will there ever be? We were not all together all of the nights of the pandemic. So there were times that I dipped into the corn whiskey. Well played. It's just not gone. That was such a fun wedding. You guys had an awesome, awesome wedding. Yeah. I remember it fondly. That's good. Yeah. I mean, the parts I can remember, you know. It's good to see you two. I know it's good to see We have not podcasted together since

pre -COVID. Was there pre -COVID? The last Dukes of Hazzard podcast was before... What'd you say? Was there -COVID real? you've not heard about COVID? yeah. -19? Yeah. Isn't that fake news? Did that really happen? You've changed. You've changed since COVID. I've just been listening to the internet, right? Everything's true on the internet. I love it. That's great. Well, it's great to see you all. I'm so excited to be here. This is like very cool.

You guys wrote a book. We did. We wrote a book. Barely. That's amazing. Thank you for, you know, coming to be our, being our marriage counselor today. We just need to bring a few things to you and get them off our Since COVID, I've switched careers. I'm now a professional marriage counselor. I think a lot of emergency managers, I think would be good marriage counselors. I think you could, you know, you're dealing with people in crisis. You're finding solutions, but first you're listening.

It's a real dual -grade crossover. It's like back to that thing where like event planners, I always thought event planners would be really good crisis managers because you you gotta have a plan. You gotta adapt that plan when the day comes. We did use some ICS for our wedding back in That's right. Yeah, you gotta pull it out. It's always the tool in the tool. This sounds like a great Legally Blonde spinoff about an event planner who becomes an emergency manager. Love it.

Ooh, you should pitch that to Reese. know. She's there waiting for this day. She's So new Twisters is coming out. Maybe if the Twisters movie is really good, this will open up a, know, gangbang for a disaster movie. Sure, sure. I think, what was that? Why? Why did you go there? know why I used that channel. It's weird. think what this is opening up is a possible avenue for rom -com disaster movies. You know what I mean? I really think could bring the rom -com back in like a big way if all the emergency managers were either...

event planners or marriage counselors. it's a whole arc. know what I mean? Yeah. can see the titles now, right? Operations Chief. Right? I think that could be a hot, you know, rom -com title. You know, Mark movie. Yeah. Liaison Officer. There it is. There it is. Liaison in Disaster City. EMI could get on. It could be an EMI joint production with Warner Brothers and Henry Switherspoon

could serve in both roles. Let's not write any more books. Let's just make movies. could write scripts. You've already written a book. So let's talk about the book. This is amazing. It's called the epistemology of disasters and social change. It has a long title. does. That means it's very smart and important, right? It's got a long title. That's what I know about. Pandemics, protests and possibilities. So you both started thinking about this back Hurricane Charlie.

Is that right? Yeah, I did. this has been kind of you've been noodling on this for a long time. A long time ago when when Mitch was like a little little boy, emergency manager. Take us back. Yeah. You were wearing like a little beanie. That's right. With the little shorts on. The that spun around on the top. And I was in Florida. And my first job after Hurricane Charlie was shutting down community food kitchens. Right. After a disaster.

everybody cleans out their fridges and then they go around sharing food with each other. And the state of Florida was like, you know, we got to shut it down for food safety concerns. And it was so - So your job was to deny people food. That's right. That was my emergency management role was to go around saying, sorry, can't eat that. survivor. You listen, food safety is important. I'm not a fan of E. coli, right? Who likes that stuff? But it was like such an expression of

showing love and trying to build a new kind of community. And it was so powerful. And I was a little bit like, I was like, I love this work. I love disaster response. I love the planning, but like, what are we, what are we doing? Like, is this what we should be doing for these communities? And I just, kind of started thinking why, and the answer to the question was always like, well, we want things to get back to normal. And so we don't want these people serving food to each other. want them to go to approved restaurants. want them to go to approved food sources. And mean, as one example, in the bigger thing, and it was kind of like, yeah,

Isn't it awesome what they're doing? Couldn't that energy be used to make that community more caring and forward -thinking and more cohesive? But the answer is no. They were like, put your beanie back on and go stand in the corner. Well, so there were a lot of disasters between now and Hurricane Charlie. So how did subsequent disasters affect this or move you or continue to have you think about this?

I had a little desk in the middle and they had like these offices around it. had a sliding door that I used as dry erase board, but it didn't work as dry erase board. Like I would try to, I was trying to be all beautiful minded and be like, look at the plants. And then I was like, shit, this doesn't address. And we were doing that one day. And then I left and, and, met Jordan at the bar. And we spent all night talking about Buffy, the vampire slayer and the Rwandan genocide.

That was our night. you do. Yeah. That was the first date. That was our first date conversation and it was amazing. so let's hear Jordan's perspective. Jordan, first date with Mitch. He brings up the Rwandan genocide. No, no, that was me. I was teaching a class on the Rwandan genocide. know. And he showed up and he's like, what are you reading? And it's like just this book of testimonies from the Rwandan genocide. And he was like, he was like, I love you. Will you marry me? That was pretty much it. I didn't have to do anything else after that. He was.

tried to start a community food kitchen. a very small one. I stood on St. Mark's Place with a friend's bag of avocados and yelled for the ingredients for guacamole until people came out of their apartments and brought the ingredients for guacamole. And we made a giant bowl of guacamole and everyone ate it.

which in a post -COVID world seems nuts, but we did and it was great. I'm very here for Disaster Community Kitchen. Now I super want guacamole. And Jordan, background is in, why don't you tell us what your background is? Cause it's very unique to Crisis Man. Neither of us can explain it ourselves. So I'm a feminist philosopher. And so when I met Mitch, was finishing my doctorate and I was

that were really complimentary to each other. I think that was, those were some of our earliest conversations about how the way that I work on and think about the world and the way that you work on and think about the world could really be in conversation. Because after the Haiti earthquake, one of the emergency management things was that the State Department took over the airport. so you're watching the State Department and Femis and assets down there. And what they did was they took over the airport and they made you fill out a form to send planes

And the planes they sent in were security planes because the State Department believed that there was a security situation. And so they prioritized a battalion of soldiers over all of the food aid that was being sent in. So for 72 hours, the airport brought in airlifted soldiers, but not food aid. And all of these organizations around the world protested. And then they invested in all of the security infrastructure, all of these armed forces, but they never invested in water, sanitation systems. They didn't build infrastructure.

And then, you you had a cholera outbreak a year later. And again, I think we were looking at it thinking, why does it have to be this way? Why does it have to be this way? Yeah. And so around that time, Hurricane Sandy happened. And partly as a result of that, I started teaching a class on the ethics of disaster, which was super fun. Mitch used to come in and give talks in that class. And I taught that every semester for years.

And so through building that class and engaging with that, started thinking about it, think, much more consistently. We wrote and presented a few papers. Although we did actually, we had our first flood also. Hurricane Irene was really important for our relationship because Jordan's apartment flooded. And so she moved in with me like six months before we got married. so, you know, it worked out. It worked out well for me. But she had to move in with me and my two young children.

you know, into our two -bedroom apartment. So that was the first of the many floods that we've gone through. Awesome. Well, so you talk a little bit about how COVID really changed things in your mind about how you view disasters. So could you talk a little bit about what was that change and how COVID shifted your thinking about this?

Well, I think up to that point, we had been largely thinking about disasters from sort of ethical perspectives, partly because that was most of the existing literature on disasters was really focused on these ethical questions. And we had started to run into the edges of that. I when we were writing about Haiti, we were starting to think about the ways in which we needed resources for understanding how the responders were showing

with one set of resources for literally understanding and conceptualizing what was happening. And that didn't necessarily line up with the experiences and the testimony of people on the ground. And so we started to think about sort of what philosophers would call decolonial questions through that. And that started to push us in the direction of thinking about epistemology or questions about how people know, how people understand the world.

Right, the first piece that we put together on that was actually for the health department. so after, before COVID, Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Maria, I deployed down to the Virgin Islands for a while and we put together like an ethical guide for responders, know, partly because my experience of going to the Virgin Islands was, I mean, a lot first, listen, so many great people.

so many great dedicated, passionate folks going there to try to do good. But they were coming in and they just knew what was right. Like they knew what they'd been trained, they were ready to deploy, they had the capabilities set up. And they would go in and they'd be like, here's the capabilities here. And if it didn't match the local culture, was like they couldn't see it, it was invisible. And so we were trying

figure out how do you train somebody to go into a situation and come with humility, which certainly other people in emergency management have tried to do, but it just, didn't click. it didn't seem to be something, it was weird. It didn't seem to be something you could like teach. And I remember I was on the, I was like down there, but I was on like the FEMA cruise ship, which everybody after Irma and Maria can remember their FEMA cruise ship deployment. And I went out one night with this group of emergency managers from all over and one of them was like,

He was like, it doesn't matter. He was like, whatever we do here, these people are just gonna, you know, they're gonna fuck it all up and we're gonna be down here again in six months. And people were like nothing will change. Yeah, the same thing. But it was also, but it was partly nothing will change because we're not, we're not trying to change it, right? You know, the, the, power grid had been rebuilt like 47 times in the past 50 years there because it just kept knocking down. put it up fragile and, and they crack it. And I actually talked to somebody just two weeks ago.

that I was down there with and she was like, you know, all those recovery resources, they went away and nothing changed. know, it's all back the same way it was before. And so we kind of were like, it's not even thinking about ethics, even trying to encourage people to do better when they're there, even changing the procedures we use in emergency management. Like it wasn't effective, it didn't go far enough. So did that ethical guide that you put together

turn into this book or is it used used in the book? Yeah, it's in there, right? Well, because I think part of what we did in that guide part of the big shift for us that that offered was that, you know, there's this move in feminist philosophy to start thinking in terms of epistemic virtues by which we mean sort of like, what kind of habits as a knower do you need to develop in order to have

humility in order to be sensitive, right? And so we were starting to think, well, maybe it's not so much the sort of virtues of action that you're bringing, but the virtues of knowledge that you're bringing. And so that was in the guide, this sort of idea that like you couldn't necessarily train people on where you're going because things move so fast in a disaster, right? There's a limit to how much of that you can do, but you could train people in how to approach not knowing things, which is like a classic.

Classic philosopher question, right? How do you know what you don't know? How do you know that you don't know that you don't know something? But those questions, we realized, those seem to be kind of like the key orienting questions that could maybe reshape a little bit of how things went on the ground. Which brings me to the problem with all this, which is, think, the word epistemology.

Right. And I'm going to inaugurate right now with my backup beer and an epistemology drinking game or epistemic epistemic counts too, because it's like every time you say that people's for me, okay. Epistemology to get through the 21st century. Epistemology is going to have to be a tool set that emergency management needs to use like, like logistics, like anything else in our pocket. We've got to understand how people see disasters, how they experience those disasters and how those disasters change what they think about the

And we've got to figure that out. You've got to use epistemology to do that. But it's like, I wish there were a shorter word. You know what I mean? But that was the tool set that we really had to go to to get to these questions. And I said it three times, so I'm just going to come in and drink it. Yeah. No, if we have to drink every time we say epistemology, this is going to get sloppy. I'm putting that on you. It's sloppy. for myself. That's all. Yeah. Well, and what I'll say about it is that within philosophy, mean, epistemology

It's the study of knowledge of how people know. And I think you're absolutely right that that's going to be a key toolkit in terms of thinking about how we know and understand disasters, but also just how people's relationship to facts and truth is deeply under threat. And so these questions of what's a reasonable belief, these seem like absolutely essential questions for us in the 21st century. But part of how we were coming to this is that one of the biggest

I think one of the fastest growing fields in philosophy in the 21st century is feminist epistemology, which are questions about justice and injustice in how people make knowledge and how background conditions of injustice, oppression, and social power and social relationships inform what kinds of knowers we are, what kinds of knowledge we make, and how we understand the world. And so that was the toolkit that we realized

was, was, had not, you know, it hadn't crossed over. Like it, it's sort of there. We weren't seeing a lot of threads of picking up that toolkit in, in thinking about disasters. And so that was the toolkit that we wanted to bring to the table. That's what I love about the book is it's bringing in these concepts that traditional crisis managers have not been exposed to. And it's providing us a new way to look at response, resiliency, recovery. And I think, again, I think you talk to a crisis manager, they would all admit.

something is broken, something is not working, the world is changing, we're getting more, you talk about this in the book, more expensive disasters, billion dollar disasters, those are happening more frequently, so what are we doing wrong? And at the same time, know, have crisis managers are familiar with things, planning assumptions, you know, when you're writing a plan, you're, well, for this plan, we're gonna assume that these things will happen, you brought up the

big disasters can go one way or the other. They can kind of break down society or they can change things for the better. And it also doesn't constantly go up or go down. It can kind of change in between. So could you talk a little bit about like that and kind of the trends of disasters and... Yeah, I think this is the super depressing part of this. Okay, Rich is... Now I'm gonna drink. No, that's right.

which is the promise for us looking at the way we respond to disasters, the way we prepare for them. They do provide these opportunities for change. There are these little windows that open where people shift how they know the world and either things can get better. You can grow cohesion. can paradise built in hell the way Rebecca Solnit talks about communities coming together. Or as we saw kind of during COVID, things can get much worse. And I think a lot of us woke

partway through COVID and thought, what world are we in? Right? Why is everything, why does it seem so dystopian? Why can't we find our way back? And part of that is obviously the politics we're living in. It's part of American society. But part of it is the ways we chose to respond to COVID broke us apart and broke our connection to truth in different ways. And there's this guy, Christopher Dyer, who's an anthropologist who studied the Exxon Valdez, right? Which was

an oil spill in late eighties in Alaska and he followed the communities that were impacted for decades. And what he saw was that every time a disaster hit them and resources came in, all these really well -intentioned resources, trying to fix them, trying to help them. And if they weren't culturally appropriate, if they didn't focus on this question of strengthening the community, right? Bringing everybody together, which they never did because federal resources aren't incentivized to do that, right? The community would break apart a little more. It got a little weaker, a little

until after 15, 20 years, it stopped functioning as a society. just, the people there no longer had relationships. They no longer had communities. And he said, and this is the depressing part, that that could happen to the entire world based on, disaster by disaster, if we keep responding in inappropriate ways that don't strengthen communities, we can break our entire society this way. And I feel like

We took some really terrible steps in that direction during COVID that we're more broken now precisely because of the ways we map out in the book, things can go really wrong. So basically we're talking into the world type stuff, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. But you also talk about how things can change for good, right? After disasters. talk about that. mean, what are the things, what were some of the examples?

you found where disasters happen and things changed for the better. And why was that? Did you identify key indicators of like, this is why things went better? Dude, yes. Mitch wasn't shutting down community kitchens. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was in many ways the big question. We were motivated.

I think to answer was this question of sort of like, okay, it does seem like there's general agreement that disasters produce social change. It seems like sometimes, there's sort of, there's this story that they produce positive social change. You can think of that as like the Rebecca Solnit story. And then there's the story that they produce punctuated entropy, right? That they produce disaster capitalism, right? That they crack things apart. And,

you know, we started from the assumption that both things were true. And part of this was that we were formulating and writing this book through COVID. And so it felt as though both things were often true simultaneously in the world right in front of us. But, you know, I will say that we got to a point where part of what, you know, our guiding star for this book, the person whose writing we came back to over and over again as we were thinking about it, was Audre Lorde's writing about surviving,

I think a couple of things. One thing that Laura helped us to understand is that, you know, she was new to St. Croix when Hurricane Hugo, relatively new to St. Croix when Hurricane Hugo hit. It was absolutely utterly destructive of the island. And for her, it was a huge wake up call.

And for her, was this sort of huge perceptual shift, which we talk about in the book, right? This idea that one of the things that disasters do is they offer these kind of revelations about the, right? Like the Canadian

called this the endoskeleton of the world.

Right. But like what disasters do is they sort of reveal the skeleton that's holding everything up the rest of the time. And the fact that that's true even for Audre Lorde was something that we really sat with and really thought about. And so for her this became a moment where she she repositioned herself in the world. She remapped her understanding of how she was located in the world how she was located in relationship to you know.

American colonial oppression, what it meant to experience a disaster like this in St. Croix rather than on Staten Island. And so that was one thing. One thing was that that Lorde gave us this way of thinking about the fact that like no one is exempt from the ways that disaster can change these perspectives. But I think the other thing is that in reading Lorde's poetry, especially the poem she wrote after Hurricane Hugo,

There is this refusal to land in bleakness. There's this always in every poem, this fight, this move at the end, this turn towards what is possible, this turn towards the ways in which the darkness of any situation can offer a pathway forward.

And so we decided at some point that that was going to orient us in the way that we were going to think about disasters. That we could not write a book about punctuated entropy that was going to assume that the end of the world was inevitable. Yeah. Yeah. And what she did, you know, first she was struggling with cancer at that time, but she used her energy for mutual aid. She invested in her community. She started feminist programs on St. Croix. She tried to bring everybody towards a little more liberation.

What she was saying was America, the structures of it were destroying them almost without thinking about it, without consideration. And the reason was she aimed it towards nostalgia.

she said America breeds nostalgia the way rabbits read bunnies, which is like one of my favorite ones. It's like Audre Lorde right there with the Daily Show, right? She just, she landed that. And the thing was that the nostalgia, which we have in recovery, like when we recover, even when we're building back better, we're still building back. And we're building back towards a memory of how we imagine the world, but that memory is baked in

white supremacy and structural racism, like we're trying to build back a world that is imagined by the most privileged people, even when we're fighting against it, even when we're trying for resilience and trying for equity, we're still working within these broader structures of our imagination of a disaster as something that destroys property owners, that breaks or disestablished social infrastructure and we're trying to get back to it. And for her, that nostalgia was tied in with colonialism.

Right? Because even the idea of St. Croix as a colony was something that like the United States has imagined and created, right? It created this as this colonial space. And so the only way to get out of it in her writing issue is to pivot, is to think about the future, to use the crisis as a break opening of those structures to move us towards a future that we have to imagine ourselves. Yeah, I love that. She, you've got a lot of great.

Lord quotes in here, the poem you open with is amazing. think every crisis manager should have that tattooed on their back. My back is already full of tattoos. There's a big American eagle there, but maybe I'll have room somewhere else. You also talk about Samuel Prince, who went through a disaster in Canada, and he seems to have maybe broken through and really changed things for the better here. Could you talk a little bit

kind of what he did. By the way, later in the book when you talk about Prince and you quote Prince, I was thinking it was the musician Prince. I was like, my gosh, I didn't know Prince. That's a real problem actually in our book, the lack of Prince lyrics. we really should. That's my one critique. For the sequel, we really got to lean on that Prince. For the movie. We Prince and Prince together. absolutely. Yeah, Samuel Prince and Purple Rain. That's the way it's got to go. Same print, it's funny because... So what did he create after? Can you tell a little bit about the disaster and then what he created

So the biggest non -nuclear explosion ever in the history of the world was in Halifax, Nova Scotia during World War I, essentially. was an ammunition ship that blew up and destroyed a chunk of Halifax. And he was a minister there. He was sitting having breakfast, I think, in his room. When it exploded, he ended up running. He turned his church into a shelter. And then later went to Columbia, wrote a dissertation about the experience. And in that dissertation,

People consider it the first work of disaster sociology. Now, I'm not a disaster sociologist. There are lots of people with more expertise in that than I am, but he said, disasters always bring social change. But he said that you don't know if that change is gonna move you forward or backward. It depends on what happens. And a lot of later scholars have disagreed with that, right? A lot of people have, this idea that disasters bring social change is controversial. And part of that for us is because

the United States more and more as it puts in procedures, our procedures are actually designed to prevent social change from happening. You know, we reimburse people based on the pre -storm value of their homes, right? So it's this going back to how things were, make things great again the way it was. And the more you do that, the more of that you happen, the emergency management procedures themselves serve to stop social change. So I think we started to see sort of less social change and disasters as emergency management infrastructure ramps

Part of that is good because you're recovering, you're putting more money into things, but it prevents the natural sort of healthy change that also helps communities grow after disasters, in our opinion, that the stuff Sam Prince saw in Halifax. And by stopping that, kind of for us, you're putting a lid on an explosion, kind of. You're like preventing natural social change from occurring, and you're not letting disasters prompt that sort of better change that they could.

Right. And so you make your community weaker and weaker and weaker. That's the punctuated entry thing not on purpose But just because you're not letting the community grow when it like needs to grow because it kind of knows it needs to change after disaster Yeah, my making should I say the word epistemology just to see if I'm I'm that's just because you want to drink more Yeah, yeah, I mean and I think that you know again, we wrote this book. We were thinking about this You

through and after COVID. And my sense is, you know, one of the things about COVID is we're all disaster survivors now, right? And I find this very useful in talking to people about this. You know, because I think we all experienced there were parts of COVID where there were forms of change that were tremendously hopeful and felt like a tremendous relief, you know?

And those maybe aren't the parts that have had the most lasting effects. In some ways they have, in some ways they haven't. But I think we've all now lived through a disaster where we can see the way in which that kind of change feels so necessary. It feels like what you have to do in order to...

to show up in the disaster in order to survive the disaster. And so that was a large part of what was pushing us was really this question of like, are the sort of, what are the phenomenological or the experiential things that are happening to people in disasters that are leading to this strong desire for social change? What brings people together? What leads to new kinds of coalitions and communities forming?

I think that a lot of us experienced this in COVID, right? There are just so many stories of mutual aid groups springing up, right? Communities coming together to check on members of their community who they've never met before, but suddenly in lockdown are looking in on one another. And also that, you know, we built this whole safety net, even governmentally during COVID. We built, we had childcare and unemployment tax credits and all of this stuff. And then we broke it. We got rid of it to put things back to

let's come together and build a socialized medicine infrastructure. And it took them decades, but they did that because they'd experienced the pandemic together. But in this country, we were kind of like, well, you know, that's over. Right. Let's go back to, let's go back to paying the doctor. Yeah. Let's just give women the vote and call it a day. That's right. That's right. That's also what Samuel Prince did, what musician Prince did, right? That he created this social structure to

to support people who were victims of disasters, Wasn't he the father of the Canadian welfare system? Yes, yeah, he was. It was amazing. That's right. It was part of his experience in Halifax. He was like, we can come together for the common good. And he made it his life's mission. That's right. And musician Prince did too. Paisley Park will always stand as a disaster resilience monument for all

It's very interesting because I mean, one thing I've seen is that survivors of disasters, they are invested in recovery. We will rebuild, right? We're coming back. And so there's this energy and momentum too. They're not giving up. They're not letting go. But it's, like you said, there's a bureaucracy of the government that comes in that kind of forces them to build it back to the way it was, again, because they don't want the societal change. So I think that's a fascinating observation.

And it almost like mutes the survivor's ability to bring about that change. Well, or even sometimes you can see it another way, you know, like the rebuild after Katrina, certainly there were lots of plans from the top down that were trying to change the structures of it. Right. And so, but for us, you're, that's the disaster capitalism thing. That's where elite folks want to say, okay, well, we're just going to bulldoze this half of the town and put them all there or whatever.

And we're not sort of talking about change for change sake. We're trying to sort of say, let's listen to the voices of survivors and not assume this or that, but like let the wisdom that comes out of their experience lead us towards some kind of better community in the future. Yeah. I mean, this is, think where the feminist philosophy is really structurally important for our argument because we're really interested in this idea that what we know, what plans we make.

reflect whose opinions, whose testimony is part of the production of shared knowledge. And so that example, part of the problem that we're identifying is this question of, well, whose voices were heard when those plans were being made? And what are the mechanisms for making knowledge? And one of the things we think a lot about is the way in which disasters are a really interesting place to ask this question, because knowledge -making in disasters is just happening at speed.

We think a lot about the speed of disasters in the book and the way in which, know, and, you know, the example of creating an entire social net during COVID is a great example. That would never have happened, right? And if we could win those fights, imagine how slowly we would win those in a non -disaster context, right? Whereas in COVID, we built those programs and activated them incredibly quickly. And so the question of

well, whose voices are being heard when we're moving that quickly? And part of our thesis is that disasters in some senses create opportunities for new voices to get uptake in those kinds of processes. And then also that in other ways, for example, through top -down responses, those voices get shut out even more rigorously than they might do at other times. And so this is also really, I think, a question for...

democratic deliberation and democratic reasoning, right? We're asking a question about whose voices get heard, what are the structures through which people's voices get heard that shape the kinds of policies that we're gonna see in disasters. And I think COVID is a really important lesson in this in that we did create a whole social safety net during COVID at speed. And if we're gonna live in a world of continuous and ongoing disaster, which I think we are, right?

doesn't seem like that's slowing down. Disasters aren't over? It's done. Season 4 was the final one. We the shark with disasters. But I think a lot of the ways in which we are likely to get significant policy changes are likely to be in response to disasters. These questions about

whose voices get uptake and what kinds of policies they shape are super important questions for disaster, but I think also super important questions for like the future of democracy. Politics and democracy. It reminds me of like when I had really bad anxiety and one of the tips that the doctor told me was to put a wear rubber band and if you're spiraling to just snap the rubber band to just kind of like get you out of that. Right. It's like to shock the system kind of to like, yeah.

right, wait, this isn't that big of a deal, I'm fine. But it's funny how disasters kind of do that. shock you and you're like, wait, things are not good. As things get more polarized, as there seem to be fewer ways of connecting, for us, disasters are one of those increasingly rare times that people can come together. So it creates a rare window for positive change, right? So even in the next decades as polarization increases,

We still see so much human feeling around these disasters. And the trick is how to honestly not trying to be cynical about it, but honestly letting that build the sort of community cohesion of our society. and, and that is what part of as an emergency manager, right? I was really worried about working in epistemology. Okay. And I'll drink later because I'm going to emphasize the importance of this point that I'm because it's so abstract, right? And I've had a lot of conversations with my, my, friends in the field.

who were so ticked off by academics writing about emergency management stuff. And I don't mean emergency management practitioner academics. I mean like theorists writing critical theory books about disasters. Like philosophers. I wasn't trying to call you out. I was trying to be nice about it. Jordan, Jordan, an feminist philosopher. Just waltzing into emergency management. Just writing books. my god. Okay, okay. We'll see if our marriage survives this.

But honestly, I think that's actually, true in a lot of, because you, I think as a merchant's managers, and even though I'm now in an academic institution and I have to own that, you know, going through the responses of disasters, going through that process is a really formative thing. And I didn't want to write something that I didn't feel like I could execute in some way, even if it's abstract, something that I couldn't bring into an ICS structure

change it in a way and it would, I mean honestly it would create fundamental changes to the way we do a lot of things, but in a way that I feel like could practically be done in emergency conditions. And so in the middle of the book, part of what In the middle of book you have the IAP template for - That's right, that's right. I just couldn't resist I know, I think we really need that. We need the -

people, there's a heroism phase where people come together and then there's a honeymoon phase where people are feeling good. There's a disillusionment phase where things fall apart. And we sort of track that earthquake through those phases to look specifically at the choices, the responses making each part that shifts the society one way or the other. And that earthquake, a lot of thinkers have talked about it as really prompting real democracy in Mexico for the first time. the story that sticks with

that I think about all the time is this woman, Evangelina Corona, who was a seamstress, she was a garment worker. And when the earthquake happened, she was trapped up on the sixth floor of her building with all of the sisterhood of other garment workers, and they couldn't get out, doors were locked, the earthquake had rendered it unescapable. And they used the garments that they had woven to make a rope that they could slide down out of the building on. And then they were there and they were surrounded by hundreds of their colleagues.

all of whom were crushed under rubble. Then they were listening to their kind of screams and groans as they died and they stayed there and their boss came and their boss said, I'm gonna help get these people out of the rubble, but I need you to get me my equipment first from it. And if you get my equipment out of the building, I'll help you rescue these people because there were all kinds of reasons that the search and rescue resources hadn't gotten there. It's another podcast episode.

So they did, they helped him get all the stuff out. And then he was like, thanks, I'm leaving. And he left them there to listen to all of their friends die. And they tried to get them out and they were there for weeks. And what they did was they came together and they founded a union and it was named after the date of the disaster. And they went to the president of the country and they had enough political will and political capital because of the suffering everybody together had gone through in the earthquake. And they were able to get the union.

Registered formally for the first time in the country because of the change that had come over them because of the change that had come over the country and that's just such a clear example of how These responses can function as ways that lead to really long -term permanent improvements in society To us you talk and something Jordan said about disasters continuing to happen and getting worse you talk about wicked disasters and I I had always thought about wicked

Wicked disasters just being like really complicated problems, know that man multi layered but you kind of lay out a different definition of wicked disasters. You want to talk a little bit about that? You don't remember it's wicked problem. We could probably get problems. Let's not let's not get the get the disasters are wicked disasters are wicked because they're made up of wicked problems all over the place. I guess I this is where I'm to feel like I'm talking too much but I love wicked problems so much that I guess I'm because it is I mean

talking back to the time we worked together, I remember you using this term. Yeah, and I did not understand it. was totally talking about it without. I think you use it incorrectly. I did. The night when he found out what it really meant was amazing. I know. my God. Wake up. was like epistemological. There are these in the 70s, there are these theorists who are trying to understand how to make a diverse democracy, right? How to bring all of these perspectives together. And what they said was

The thing about a wicked problem is that it's not just complicated. It's not just complex. Coming into that problem with a solution, trying to define it from one perspective makes it unsolvable because the problem is created between all of these different perspectives. So anybody that shows up in a room, and I think anybody that's worked on equity issues, anybody that's done a lot of community engagement in a deep way knows this feeling where you bring together a hundred stakeholders. They all have really different perspectives.

And if anybody comes in with a solution, it's not going to work. It's like, it's a done deal from the, from the get go. And you have to be able to go through this journey of listening and building a solution for them. And the theorists of wicked problems in the seventies said, you know what? It's actually not possible to solve them. Like we're, we're screwed because there's never a time when you can, when you can break open the established,

perspectives and biases that people are coming in with. And the magic of the disasters to us was that it actually created a time like that, like a weird, this weird time where people's identity as a disaster survivor overcame some of the other identities they were coming with. And so they could come together in a way that they could be more listening and more humble and find these emergent solutions and learn to know together. And that was only really possible because of the underlying

feminist epistemology principles and theories that we were ever bringing to those problems. Right. And so we were drawing heavily on two major frameworks in feminist philosophy. One is standpoint theory, which is this idea that, and this is, think, central to wicked problems. Depending on where you're standing, the problem might look different. And I think

COVID's a great example of that that we all lived through, right? Depending on where you're standing, COVID is a problem about, you know, surging healthcare systems, or it's a problem about the government overstepping on liberty, or it's a problem of like a crisis of healthcare, or it's a problem of race disparity, and all of those things Or it's not even a problem. Yeah, it's not even a thing, right? Depending on who is doing the work of telling the story or doing

preparedness than what the disaster is, is like a different thing, right? And so this is a little bit Quarantelli's thing about the, you know, the blind men and the elephant, but the feminist philosophers are going to say, right, but it's not just that it's the blind men and the elephant. We also have this second problem, which is that we have these patterns of injustice with these longstanding patterns that create situations such that these perspectives over here are always going to get uptake.

And these perspectives over here are going to be systematically shut out. And so our understanding, for example, of what COVID was going into it, it reflects who it was that was writing guidance, who it was that was writing plans for what a pandemic was. And I think one of the most pervasive experiences of those first few months of the pandemic was, we can think of just two that were super important, right? One was that shutting down schools, I know this is shocking.

but it led to a childcare crisis. I know. you'd a feminist, who would have told you guys that was coming? That's cool. And then second of all, the racial disparities that COVID shaped, which were glaringly obvious within, I mean, almost immediately. But one of the things we read about in the book is the way that even as they were becoming a parent, you had, you

Anthony Fauci at the White House sort of saying, yes, these are a problem, but they're a problem like outside the disaster. Like there just are these racial disparities in health. It's not part of the pandemic. It's this like other thing that's going on. And so again, what the pandemic is would seem to depend on who you ask. And it depends on the power dynamics are going on there. So part of what Mitch and I are interested in is

What disasters actually seem to do is they create contexts where, yes, the dominant solution to problems reflect elite perspectives, but also the kinds of perceptual shifts and emerging communities can lead to excluded voices suddenly getting uptake. And we saw that really clearly during Black Lives Matter, which successfully

were largely white, majority white. That's a really, really significant shift. And there are lots of theorists who've written about those protests. Very few of them have written about them as the result of something that the pandemic was doing to all of us. And so that's really the thread that Mitch and I pick up is this idea that we should understand those protests as a reflection of these kinds of...

of shifts, right? Both individual shifts, right? Suddenly being like, I'm open for the first time to this argument about racism, right? But also the collective shifts as people are in new communities learning from one another and so on and so forth, right? Although it's worth saying, some of that is hopeful and some of that, because we also write in the book, right, about the rise of, you know, reactionary movements, conspiracy theories, authoritarianism. And so those same processes

One of the things we look really closely at is sort of how, if you look at the first four months of the pandemic at a week by week basis, you can see the rise of those progressive shifts, but you can also see the rise of the reactionary ones. And the problem is that in some ways the reactionary ones have more staying power. They're staying with us longer. And for us, one reason is because our emergency management practices, which we want to feel are neutral.

We want to feel that we're apolitical as emergency managers, that we're not putting our thumb on the scale. But because they're designed towards recovering the past, they're always going to juice or give more energy to reactionary energies than the kind of protests we saw for Black Lives Matter. So unfortunately, because we're looking at response and recovery from a backwards nostalgic perspective, we're not neutral. Like we're doing things that are going to help reactionary protests last longer.

than progressive change does. Without meaning to, unintentionally. we're do things that help prop up the traditional, safe, secure, rebuilding. Right. Than like the new novel thing. Which unfortunately means that if you're a reactionary group that's like harking back to the past, like I wanna bring back a, America great again, bring back

this idealized Bring back the 80s, you know? You know, that thing, right? As long as the cocaine is there. I you gonna say as long as Prince is there, but you went on a whole other I mean, I think Prince and cocaine, they go together. I think it's fair to say. Samuel Prince, I'm talking about Samuel. Reverend Prince, was a big cook. Although, wasn't musician Prince also a reverend? I feel like there was a Definitely, probably like multiple times over. He was like at least seven or

Different religions and different. You the whole deal. He made his own. So how do we So, how do you change things? How do you how do you? How do you make it so that when disasters happen they change for the better they can go either way they change for the better How do you hold back? Government who has this pressure to respond to do things to solve problems a lot of all times Those are our best intentions, right? They're good people trying to

help people in need, but they're kind of rebuilding this past thing. So how do we change things? How do we give communities space to build these networks and to bring about positive change? Well, the first thing I want to say to that is actually, Andrew, the way that you put that question together is really helpful, I think, for seeing this distinction that we were talking about very early on in our work between sort of like the ethical question and the epistemic question. I know I have to drink because I said that. I'll do it for you. OK. Me too.

In that, right, the problem that we're naming is not that, you know, emergency management sort of has questionable ethical commitments, right? Like, I think one of the things that's really, really clear, especially post -COVID, is this real growth and emphasis on equity, right? On really trying to think about what does a just response look like, right? So the problem isn't necessarily ethical.

The problem is epistemic. The problem is in the habits, tools, and training that we're bringing to conceptualize in what the problems are. That's where this wicked problem thing comes in, right? So part of what Mitch and I are getting at is, you know, writing new ethical frameworks, new kinds of guidance, new theories of justice is only gonna get us so far if we don't deal with the fact that the sort

You know, like I like this epistemology of like logistics, right? The sort of toolkit that we're bringing to say, what is the problem we're trying to solve? What is the problem here? If that toolkits flawed, then no theory of justice is going to get us where we want to go. And so, and you know, because I think what we saw during COVID was we saw good people stand up and fight for equity, right? We saw the federal government put together their long -term plan for equitable recovery and resilience. We saw

all kinds of cities stand up for new safety nets and equitable practices. And we aren't saying, just to kind of amplify what you're saying, that there are sort of bad ethical people in there. We're saying people are swimming upstream. They're trying to fight against a set of structures that are just more powerful than they are. And every time they think they not to win, the reason they feel disillusioned and beaten down is because they're being beaten down because they're trapped within an epistemological structure that isn't letting them make the change they want.

So you were saying, well, how do you make it better? so what we're trying to do, and this is hard, and it's blown my brain up, I'm at least 30 % more crazy than I was years ago, is in the book, in the podcast, we're trying to tell a story. And it's almost like solving a mystery. It's like, we've got to start from, why are we creating?

this war, why do we do this? Why do our disaster policies do this? What are they doing? Why are they creating punctuating entropy? And a lot of people may not even go with us that far on the journey. And then we've got to talk about, well, what's that doing? It's because we have this way we imagine disasters that doesn't line up with reality and we're stuck in that. And then it's, well, why do we create that? Why don't we imagine disasters the way they really happen? And it's because we're working on behalf of

system that wants to stay the same, doesn't want to change. And so then we've got to say, okay, well, how does that play out in a disaster? What are the steps and the standpoints? And then we've got to build out, well, what are its new tools? What are new ways to imagine? How does Audre Lorde, how does Octavia Butler, how does Christy Dotson and all of these thinkers guide us into new ways to imagine disasters? And then we've got to say, okay, let's take all of that and let's try to put out new rules and guidelines that would invest

communities with the resources and ability to like imagine new futures and emergency managers act in our framing really like doulas. There's been so much great work on doulas recently and how they guide people through the birth process and where emergency managers are really not trying to recover you to the past, but trying to guide you on this journey into some kind of new future. That's the pathways and the mystery we're trying to take people through in the book and in the podcast.

I love it. I mean, it's such a great book. It's an important book. I also think it's like a very important book as far as an evolution of where the industry is going. Like I think it's, it's, we talked about this on the Duke's podcast, right? It's emergency management is a young kind of discipline. And I think this is an awesome next step for really elevating the industry into what we need to think about. So I'm so glad y 'all wrote the book and it's great. Everybody should read it and become a disaster doula.

I love that. I love that. I'm just grateful our marriage survived. Me too.

that was awesome. I really, enjoy drinking beer, talking to Andrew. Also you, you know, no shade. I mean, talking to Andrew is always awesome.

So this season on Tough Shift, we're gonna do something different for us. We're gonna try to tell a story episode by episode, building on each other, trying to make one coherent argument out of the whole season. Next episode, we're gonna talk about disaster policy. What is it we're saying is wrong with it? How do we fix it? What are the ways that it's failing us?

Then in episode three, we're gonna talk about how we imagine disasters, including fun, a discussion of disaster movies.

Episode nine, we're gonna take a look at the counter example, which is the rise of reactionary social movements in the pandemic. We'll take a look at how our policies tend to sustain those reactionary movements rather than the progressive and transformational ones. Now this leads us to ask the next question, which is, if we want positive social change and disaster, how should we imagine disaster differently?

In episodes 10 and 11, we'll try to answer this question by drawing on resources from science fiction, social movements, and the poetry of Audre Lorde.

finally, we're going to bring it all back together to think about practical ways that we could change how we handle these crazy events with all of the perceptual shifts and shifts in knowledge they bring to lay out a pathway into the future that will be better for all of us.

It's a hard job, it's kind of depressing, but at the end we think it's a hopeful journey and we hope you'll come on it with us.

this season of Tough Shift.