February 11

11:30am

Sage 5711

Disasters reveal injustice in society; disasters create new injustices. The wide variety and impact of disasters globally demands new approaches to research, collaboration, and disaster justice. The Disaster Haggyo–“haggyo” translates to “school” in Korean–is an experiment in STS research and pedagogical methods. The Disaster Haggyo is a disaster studies school aimed at accelerating the implementation of cutting-edge disaster research in the context of mutual aid. Disaster justice is an emerging framework for participatory action research (PAR), seeking to move past discrimination of hazards and disasters by types and discovering the social forces and governmental actions that put some vulnerable people in harm’s way while protecting others. It also sets out to break apart status-inflected binaries such as student/teacher, researcher/subject, classroom/research field site. And in so doing, the methodology of the Haggyo, with an emphasis on the equal status of the organizers and the participants, transparency in design, and new shared experiences, also yields insights into the possibilities for a more just approach to STS disaster research.