Remaking, Rethinking and Resisting Disaster Education

Abstract

At the start of this book I considered that disaster education is a complex pedagogical range of forms. Although the forms of disaster education may be diverse (spanning television, film, popular culture and written media) and increasingly technologically sophisticated (particularly in terms of social media and transmedia forms) it cannot be separated from a societal context where both covert, and overt, inequalities exist. The emphasis in this volume has been on racial inequalities. These, though, are intersected with other forms of inequality and this volume has shown how disaster education discourses are imbricated with gender inequalities (in terms of hyper-masculinist emphasis on survival, or the gendered division of labour supposedly necessary for survival), hetronormativity (in terms of specifying a ‘conventional’ nuclear family in survival), class inequalities (in terms of the emphasis given to survival of elites, the classed nature of resources needed for survival and classist stereotypes of middle class survivors), disability (in terms of specifying the ‘able’ as survivors) and faith (in terms of recent pathologisation of Muslims in disaster education). The ways in which these inequalities work together (and sometimes apart) in determining equity in disaster education is worthy of further study.