Abstract
Today, social scientific research into disaster takes three forms. At the international level, what is known as disaster studies has emerged as a distinct domain.1 Work on disaster has also gained a foothold in the relatively well-organized, if very broad, framework of research into risk.2 Finally, a great deal of research, some of which is of significant importance, has been carried out in piecemeal fashion from the point of view of a tremendously varied number of approaches. These include social anthropology (Hiroshima),3 the anthropology of biology (Chernobyl),4 anthropological work on “social suffering” (Bhopal),5 science studies (Bhopal again),6 the socio-anthropology of death (a series of collective accidents in France in the twentieth century),7 economic sociology (the Amoco Cadiz oil spill in Brittany and the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska),8 the sociology of public problems (asbestos pollution in France),9 the sociology of social movements and trade union action (Minamata),10 and management science (Montana’s Mann Gulch forest fire).11 The field of disaster research thus appears at once a specialized and rather well-demarcated domain, and a potential but still excessively fragmentary locus of major trends in the social sciences.
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© 2015 Sandrine Revet and Julien Langumier
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Dodier, N. (2015). Postscript: Thinking (by way of) Disaster. In: Revet, S., Langumier, J. (eds) Governing Disasters. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435460_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435460_8
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