XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

680

Heritage, History, and Humanity: What's Old Becomes New Again

RC39 Sociology of Disasters (host committee)

Language: English

At the last ISA World Congress of Sociology in Yokohama (2014), the late Joseph Scanlon (a pre-eminent Canadian disaster scholar) organized a session called “Learning from the Past: Research into Past Disasters.” With this paper session, we propose to pick up where Dr. Scanlon left off. In the past 15 to 20 years, there has been a renaissance of historical and historicist studies of disaster. This paper session presents recent research in the histories of disaster and disasters; that is, research into how the category of disaster was built, understood, and deployed, and how specific disasters were experienced, responded to, and remembered. These historical studies, as Dr. Scanlon well understood, are useful not only in their own right, but as ways of “learning from the past” for the sake of contemporary sociological and DRR questions. This session will also highlight research on past disasters and examine what we can learn from these historic events while also focusing on knowledge that can help protect us in the future.