Disasters, Continuity, and the Pathological Normal

Ryan Hagen; Rebecca Elliott

doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/12824

Authors

Ryan Hagen Department of Sociology, Columbia University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6555-0746

Ryan Hagen is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. Working at the intersection of the sociology of organizations, the environment, cities, and the sociology of knowledge, he studies how risk perception shapes social action and how this work of anticipating future danger influences macro-level social change.
Rebecca Elliott Department of Sociology, London School of Economics https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6983-7026

Rebecca Elliott is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Her research examines the intersections of environmental change and economic life, as they appear across public policy, administrative institutions, and everyday practice. She is author of Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2021).

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/12824

Keywords:

disaster, social change, risk, COVID-19

Abstract

In this introductory essay to our symposium we argue that “Sociology After COVID-19” needs to center “disaster” itself as an object of study and theory, and that doing so can productively reframe sociology’s fundamental concerns. Building off nascent interdisciplinary work in critical disaster studies, as well as on the insights of our own contributors, we advance and elaborate two theses. First, while disasters are disruptive, they are not purely so; as they unfold, they enfold continuities such that they are best understood as a part of social reality rather than apart from it. Second, disasters are not pathological deviations from “normal” so much as they are the most salient manifestations of the ways that the normal is in fact pathological. A more critical approach to disaster can lead sociologists to examine more closely the interrelationship between the production of continuities and ruptures in social and economic life, enriching our understanding of core disciplinary concerns about social change, stratification, and inequality.

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Disasters, Continuity, and the Pathological Normal

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