Critical Disaster Studies In the Age of Polycrisis: Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Perspectives on Vulnerability, Resilience and Disaster Governance

Recent disasters—including climate-related hazards, technological accidents, forced displacement, and compound emergencies—have challenged conventional understandings of disasters as discrete events caused by external hazards. Increasingly, disaster scholars argue that disasters are socially produced phenomena emerging through the interaction of environmental hazards, political decisions, institutional arrangements, and historically embedded inequalities. Critical Disaster Studies has become one of the most influential developments in the field, shifting attention from hazards themselves to the social, economic, political, and cultural processes that create vulnerability long before a disaster occurs. This perspective challenges technocratic and hazard-centered approaches by examining how power relations, governance regimes, colonial histories, gendered structures, racialized inequalities, disability, migration status, age, and class shape both exposure to risk and recovery trajectories. At the same time, contemporary disasters reveal the need for genuinely interdisciplinary approaches. This session invites contributions that critically engage with disasters as socially and politically constructed phenomena. We particularly welcome papers exploring, but not limited to, gendered dimensions of disaster; disability and disaster justice; ageing, care, and vulnerability; migration, race, ethnicity, and disaster risk; LGBTQ+ experiences in disaster settings; intersectional approaches to recovery and resilience; indigenous and local knowledge systems; decolonial perspectives on disaster research and practice; and Global South approaches to risk and recovery. By bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary and geographical contexts, the session seeks to advance critical debates on the future of disaster sociology in an era increasingly characterized by polycrisis, systemic risk, and growing social inequalities.