Waiting for the Big One: Risk, Science, Experience, and Culture in Disaster Preparedness

ISBN-13: 9783030152918 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 279 str.

Charlotte Mazel-Cabasse

Spis treści

Chapter 1. Introduction 

1.1 A Questioning Situation

1.1 The Uncertain Space of Risk

1.1.1 The Multiple Existences of the Earthquake in the Bay Area

1.1.2 About the Actant, Agency and Assemblages

1.2 Paying Attention to the Process of Insturation

1.2.1 Defining Souriau's Concept of Insturation

1.2.2 About the Following Chapters

Chapter 2. The Multiples Existences of the Earthquake Risk

2.1 Thinking With Disaster

2.1.1 The Apparent Paradox of the Bay Area

2.1.2 Situated Knowledge and Multiple Perspectives

2.1.3 Making the Risk Visible

2.1.4 Waiting for the Big One

2.2 The Denial of Topography and the Exploitation of Nature

2.2.1 Nature as a Resource

2.2.2 The Multiple Ecologies of the Bay Area

2.2.3 Entangled Inscriptions of Risk

2.2.3.1 Visible Trace 1: Mapping the Faults

2.2.3.2 Visible Trace 2: The California Memorial Stadium

2.2.3.3 Visible Trace 3: The Bridges

Chapter 3. Traumatic Legacies: Shaping the Space of Risk

3.1 The Oakland Fire Controversies

3.1.1 Inquiring About the Traces of the Fire

3.1.2 A Surprising Field Research

3.1.3 Delimiting the Fire

3.1.3.1 The Fire: A Recollection Attempt

3.1.3.2 Living Through the Fire: The Emotional Measure of Space

3.2 Transformation of Space After the Disaster

3.2.1 A Science and Technology Tale from 1906

3.2.1.1 The Complex Legacy of the Big One

3.2.2 Hybrid Science, Hybrid Scientists

3.2.2.1 Movement and Science

3.2.2.2 Science and Dependence

3.2.2.3 Distance and Attention

3.2.2.4 Distance and Attachment

3.2.2.5 The Expert as Amateur

3.3 A Network of Attention to the Risk

Chapter 4. Living with Risks

4.1 Seizing the Earthquake as a Phenomenon

4.1.1 "Did you Feel It?"

4.1.2 Seeing the Quake: The Indirect Experience from Elsewhere

4.2 Emotions that Connect

4.2.1 Joking About the End of the World

4.2.2 Dealing with Fear, Defining and Identity

4.2.3 Habit, Denial and the Un-extroardinary Existence of the Earthquake Risk

4.3 Hybrid Knowledge

4.3.1 Knowing th eRisk

4.3.2 Attending Uncertainty: About Fate, Chance, and the Metaphysical Dimension of the Risk

4.4 Transformative Aspects of an Earthquake

Chapter 5. The Case for Not Letting San Francisco Collapse

5.2.1 Translation 1: From Event to Knowledge

5.2.2 Translation 2: Monitoring the Earth's Crust

5.2.2.1 Tool Box

5.2.2.2 Failures of Translation: The Parkfield Experiment

5.2.2.3 New Developments, Old Patterns

5.2.3 Translation 3: A Step Towards Safety

5.2.3.1 Creation of a Legislative Body

5.2.3.2 Cities' Resilience

5.2.3.3 The Regional Level: An Example of Infrastructure

5.2.3.4 The Local Level: The Example of Soft-Story Buildings

5.3 A Transition Still to be Built: Between Science, Expertise, and Public Mobilization

Chapter 6. What (Sociotechnical) Resilience is Made of: Personal Trajectories and Earthquake Risk Mitigation in the San Francisco Bay Area

6.1.1 Genealogy of Sociotechnical Resilience as a Process

6.1.1.1 Laying the Foundations: The First Steps Toward Resilient Infrastructures

6.1.1.2 The Materialization of Resilience

6.1.2 Never Again: The Trauma That Comes First

6.1.2.1 Emotional Bonding and Politics: The Co-Construction of Resilience

6.1.3 Fragile Infrastructure, Fragile Resilience

Chapter 7. Conclusion

Postface

Appendix A - Some Definitions

O autorze

Charlotte Mazel-Cabasse, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Center for Digital Humanities, jointly developed by the University and the Polytechnic School of Lausanne, Switzerland. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography and Science and Technologies Studies from the University of Paris-Est, an MA in Cultural Geography from Université de Reims, France, and an MA and BA in Information and Communications Sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication (CELSA) at Université Paris Sorbonne. 

Blurb

This book helps understand how the future Big One (a large-scale and often-predicted earthquake) is understood, defined, and mitigated by experts, scientists, and residents in the San Francisco Bay Area. Following the idea that earthquake risk is multiple and hard to grasp, the book explores the earthquake’s “mode of existence,” guiding the reader through different epistemic moments of the earthquake-risk definition. Through in-depth interviews, the book provides a rarely seen anthropology of risk from the perspective of experts, scientists, and concerned residents for whom the possibility of partial or complete destruction of their living environment is a constant companion of their everyday lives. It argues that the characterization of the threats and the measures taken to limit its impacts constitute an integrated part of both their residential experiences and their professional practices.