"Discussion on a more self-reflexive and enabling geography: the case of disaster risk as assemblages"
Physical and human geographers tend to look at the world as something that needs to be discovered and explained. Finding bits of nature or society, they further drive a wedge between their disciplines. In current manuscript the case of landslide risk is taken to illustrate how assemblage thinking, which does not hold the separation between nature and society, may be useful to make more conscious choices about which world we want to live in. I look back at a research project on landslide risk in Equatorial Africa in which I participated from 2014 till 2018. I show how this concept was mobilized and very productively enacted landslide risk in the case study area, thereby unintentionally silencing other realities and identities. At the end of our research, the landslide risk of the project nevertheless remained fragmentary, unfinished, and will probably never form the totalizing unity it aspired at. This observation, I argue, is encouraging since it highlights that we may always maintain some agency regarding the world we want to live in. Towards the end of the paper I therefore make some, rather bold, statements about the way geographers could conceive their work.
The full paper can be found here.
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Kewan is a Marie-Curie Individual Fellow (MSCA-IF) and post-doctoral researcher at “Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation” (CSI – Ecole des Mines), Paris. He is also a former VUB researcher.
Website: https://www.csi.minesparis.psl.eu/en/people/post-doc-en/kewan-mertens/
Project: NatUVal – Opening the black box of nature valuation: the case of Unesco and its parcs