Anthropocene Meets Disaster

2023 AIFIS-MSU Conference on Indonesian Studies - Parallel Session 10

Session Date/Time: Sat Jul 15, 2023, 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM ET

This panel discusses a fundamental critique to the concept of disaster, offering a more nuanced angle that goes beyond the management aspect of disaster studies. It questions the separation of nature and culture and human and nonhuman that has been central, albeit uncritically discussed, in disaster studies. The panel draws on recent attention to the anthropocene to encourage a deeper analysis of disaster as human-nonhuman relations. While there have been alternatives to the anthropocene --for example capitalocene, plantationocene, or chtulucene-- the turn to the anthropocene addresses a neglected perspective that highlights the role of non-human (geological materials, spirits, animals, forests, radioactive materials, etc.) in their relations to the human on the planetary scale. By focusing on the planetary scale, we pay attention to the various entangled embodiments that co-create the world. Locating disaster in the anthropocene, essays in this panel conceptually define disaster as ruination, encroachment, interference, and extinction. They discuss several examples of disaster as human-human and human-nonhuman relational moments. Fadjar I. Thufail’s paper talks about how the relation connecting human to animal shapes disaster as ontological moments, bringing radioactive materials (as the case of Fukushima disaster) and charred animal remains (as the case of Merapi disaster) into the assemblages called disaster. Irina Rafliana’s paper investigates how oscillations of sea waves, from the regular waves to the extreme tsunami waves, is an anthroposenic moments shaping the production of tsunami science. Fathun Karib’s paper discusses disaster as a moment caught between two movements: the first movement of the earth through the oil and gas accumulation and the second movement is the capital accumulation through production processes. These two types of accumulation movements are movements of human and extra-human activities intertwined in coproducing Mudflow Disaster. This panel offers an innovative approach that will benefit disaster studies and anthropocene studies. The papers suggest that disaster studies must look beyond management issues, paying more attention to the spiritual, anthropogenic, historical, environmental, and multispecies dimensions of disaster. They also bring the discussion of the anthropocene to specific histories of communities’ relation with their surrounding ecologies.

Keywords: anthropocene; disaster

Panel Organizer/Chair: Fadjar Ibnu Thufail, National Agency of Research and Innovation (BRIN)-PRW

List of Paper Presentations:

• Disastrous Environment-Making: The Lapindo Mudflow Disaster, Mud Volcano Formation and Contested Geological Narration. (Fathun Karib)

• Unknowing the Known: Tsunami Waves and Warning System Technologies (Irina Rafliana)

• Disaster as More-than-Human Assemblage (Fadjar Ibnu Thufail)