Episode overview
Episode 5 centers Black power and Black scholarship as foundational to understanding disasters, vulnerability, resistance, and justice. Through a wide-ranging conversation grounded in lived experience, political struggle, and long-term community engagement, the episode examines how Black intellectual traditions reshape how disasters are understood, studied, and responded to.
Hosts
Jason von Meding
Ksenia Chmutina
Guests
Danielle Rivera — Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley; scholar of environmental and climate justice working with rural and unincorporated marginalized communities
Dewald van Niekerk — Professor at North-West University (South Africa); founder and editor-in-chief of Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies; leading scholar of disaster risk in Southern Africa
Key themes
Black scholarship as central—not peripheral—to disaster studies
Structural racism, historicity, and the “disaster before the disaster”
Community resistance, agency, and epistemologies of survival
Ubuntu, mutual support, and collective responsibility
Rejecting colorblind and event-focused disaster narratives
Long-term engagement versus extractive disaster research
Bridging scholarship, practice, and policy
Core discussion highlights
Danielle Rivera discusses Clyde Woods’ work on the Mississippi Delta, emphasizing the importance of deep, place-based scholarship that traces disasters through long histories of structural racism, political economy, and resistance.
Woods’ concept of “the disaster before the disaster” is explored as a way of understanding disasters as outcomes of deliberate abandonment and plantation logics rather than isolated failures or surprises.
The conversation challenges dominant disaster narratives that center elite losses while marginalizing the experiences of poorer and racialized communities.
Dewald van Niekerk reflects on his engagement with Black Consciousness thought and the work of Mamphela Ramphele, highlighting kindness, dignity, and community as starting points for resilience.
Ubuntu is discussed as a philosophy emphasizing interdependence, shared humanity, and collective problem-solving—offering important lessons for disaster risk reduction and recovery.
Both guests critique paternalistic and technocratic approaches to disaster management, arguing for community-led, non-extractive, and context-sensitive engagement.
The episode reflects on the evolution of disaster studies, calling for deeper interdisciplinarity, stronger links between theory and practice, and greater honesty about power, inequality, and history.
