Disaster Capitalism Research Articles

The hollow university: Disaster capitalism befalls American higher education

Over the last 40 years, American institutions of higher education have been encouraged to align with the private sector by policymakers, think tank experts and businessmen in order to become more efficient and more accountable. In a wider sense, this new partnership may be evidence of what has been termed “disaster capitalism.” In disaster capitalism, crises are treated as economic opportunities. Governing bodies become “hollow states” which serve only to regulate contracts and provide further opportunities to entrepreneurs. The supposed crisis of accountability in American higher education may be such an opportunity. This paper argues for the emergence of the “hollow university” in American higher education. In the hollow university, state legislatures, think tank experts, leaders from the private sector and higher education administrators help to create a climate where institutions are more amendable to private sector partnerships. In order to determine this, I examine the desired inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes of four performance-based funding policies in the United States and demonstrate how the wording of these policies allow for and encourage private sector partnerships, specifically with emerging data companies such as Civitas Learning. Implications for the public mission of universities are discussed.

Social Policy as Secondary Violences in the Aftermath of a Disaster

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures plans for the rebuilding of New Orleans favored the redevelopment of some communities over others. Where residents of vulnerable communities, in particular the Lower Ninth Ward, protested the erasure of their communities, they have been largely socially abandoned as a retaliatory measure for not acquiescing to the elite plan of “Katrina Cleansing.” The implementation of this social abandonment as social policy and the various policies and conditions that have collectively punished residents of the Lower Ninth Ward who are trying to rebuild their community should be seen as uneven racialized capitalist development and as an important extension to what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” In this article, I conceptualize these policies and conditions as secondary violences and through three vignettes I provide a brief description of life in the Lower Ninth Ward where these violences permeate the warp and the woof of the community.

Urban Power and Community Development in the ‘World Risk Society’: Post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans (usa)

This article examines urban power and community movements when a city is consumed by a major disaster. Using New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina as its case study, this investigation will identify discriminatory police practices, public-private development policies, and ethnopolitical leadership that reproduced historic racial and class inequality in post-Katrina New Orleans. This study will argue that it was not so-called disaster capitalism, but automatic or “reflexive” re-development (Ulrich Beck’s concept) that revived the city’s traditional racial caste and structural class stratification. Finally, this policy mix in disaster response initiatives overshadowed specific strategies and goals for rebuilding advocated by community-based movements.

Racialized Disaster Patriarchy: An Intersectional Model for Understanding Disaster Ten Years after Hurricane Katrina

The year 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall just outside of New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Critical narratives point to the glaring racial and economic inequality that contextualized the catastrophe. However, most Katrina discourse has been limited by its neglect of intersectional feminist analysis. In this article I introduce a model for making intersectional sense of Hurricane Katrina with lessons for the study of other disasters. By intersectional I mean a gender- and race-conscious framework that exposes the way in which structural sexism and racism came together to produce the disaster and even the social justice response to it. Following Naomi Klein’s (2005) use of the term “disaster capitalism,” I call the intersectional formation “racialized disaster patriarchy” as it refers to political, institutional, organizational, and cultural practices that converge before, during, and after disaster to produce injustice. Disaster patriarchy links the intersectional experience of disaster to the experience of recovery and the politics of the grassroots social movement for a just reconstruction.

Humane Education

Humane Education

Archaeology as Disaster Capitalism

Archaeology is a form of disaster capitalism, characterized by specialist managers whose function is the clearance of Indigenous heritage from the landscape, making way for economic development. When presented with this critique, archaeologists respond strongly and emotionally, defending archaeology. Anger emanates from and revolves around the assertion that archaeologists are not just complicit in but integral to the destruction of the very heritage they claim to protect. In what we believe is an act of philosophical and economic self-preservation, mainstream archaeologists actively forget the relationship between archaeology, violence, and the global heritage crisis. Securely defended by its practitioners, archaeology therefore remains an imperial force grounded in the ideology of growth, development, and progress.

People or Profit? Two Post-Conflict Reconstructions in Beirut

Whether following disasters or extended periods of civil conflict and war, the development industry views reconstruction as a window of opportunity within which to affect otherwise deeply unpopular reforms in the name of market-driven reconstruction and improvement. Critics, who emphasize the pain that neoliberal reconstruction entails, even as it often fails, term such projects “disaster capitalism.” This article examines the institutional priorities and urban vision of two post-conflict reconstruction projects in Beirut, Lebanon. The first, undertaken by a private real estate holding company in the 1990s, was part of a radical experiment in market-driven reconstruction but closely approximates disaster capitalism. The second, undertaken by a nonprofit NGO, presented itself as an alternative approach that prioritized people over profit and sought to return residents to their pre-war communities. The contrast and connections between the two offer useful lessons for future instances of post-trauma reconstr...

Capitalism and suffering

The present article is an exploration of the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and suffering in a broad sense, which includes everything from economic and physical suffering, psychic suffering in the form of anxiety, self-doubt, uncertainty and stress, to more acute suffering, such as identifiable pathologies. Its point of departure is the patho-analytic principle, that one can gain an understanding of the general psychic condition of humanity by focusing on the characteristic traits of a pathology such as, for example, obsessional neurosis, and examining the possibility that some of these characteristics are encountered in the population at large. Focusing first on evidence of severe economic suffering under the impact of what Klein calls "disaster capitalism", the argument proceeds to Parker's claim, that the typical subject under capitalism displays the character of obsessional neurosis, then to Salecl's examination of capitalism's "ideology of choice", Verhaeghe's investigation of the effects of a market-based economy on psychic health, and Federici's claim that there are signs of increasing resistance to capitalist labour. It concludes with some prospective thoughts on Salecl's, and Hardt and Negri's diagnosis of present social conditions under capitalism.

Preservation as ‘Disaster Capitalism’: The Downside of Site Rescue and the Complexity of Community Engagement

As ethics have increasingly become a topic of interest for archaeologists, ‘heritage preservation’ has become harder to define. What was once thought to be a very simple and benign idea is now seen clearly as a colonial construction. There are no reliable rules to guide decisions about how heritage should be preserved, even if it is possible to determine which heritage should be preserved. However, most archaeologists and preservationists accept that the final say belongs with the people whose heritage or community is the focus of a preservation programme. In this paper I consider how imposed preservation schemes, buttressed by hyped-up public concern about the ‘loss’ of archaeological sites, can alienate people from their resources, making them vulnerable to predatory organizations. I bring in contrasting case studies from my own work in Belize and Kyrgyzstan to exemplify the complex ramifications of promoting preservation.

The Racial Politics of Neoliberal Regulation in Post-Katrina Mississippi

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the landscape of much of coastal Mississippi, regional boosters frequently made the counterintuitive claim that the damage wrought by the storm actually represented an opportunity. Based on extensive empirical research and drawing from literature on racialization, white privilege, urban neoliberalism, and disaster capitalism, I show that the “opportunity” the storm produced was to remake the landscape in ways that deepen the neoliberalization of governance in the region. The justification of these governing and accumulation strategies hinged on the twin discourses of the region as a “blank slate” and the racial narrative of what Thomas (2011) calls “banal multiculturalism.” The relationship between the governing and accumulation strategies on the one hand, and the cultural politics of race on the other, are best understood, I argue, through the lens of the often-overlooked regulation approach.

The Canterbury Earthquakes and the Production of Reality in When a City Falls

The documentary When a City Falls (2011), directed by Gerard Smyth, promotes itself as “the people’s story”1 of the Canterbury earthquakes. Constructed almost entirely from amateur video, CCTV, and the director’s own handheld footage, the film creates a startling impression of the earthquakes, aftershocks, and aftermath in their spontaneity and lived immediacy. However, in the following analysis I will problematize the film’s construction of reality and community within the context of Melanie Klein’s critique of “disaster capitalism” and Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of the operation of disaster and moving images in staging reality within a post-9/11 environment characterized by an accelerated devaluation of the sign.

The rise of disaster capitalism? A report from Japan since the tsunami and the nuclear explosion around Fukushima

The rise of disaster capitalism? A report from Japan since the tsunami and the nuclear explosion around Fukushima

Academia and the American Worker: Right to Work in an Era of Disaster Capitalism?

Why do educational degrees of any kind, especially advanced degrees, matter if there are only part-time service industry jobs waiting for graduates? In this article, the reduced labor market experienced by graduate students seeking tenure-track positions as professors is couched as one example within a much larger context that includes the following: contradictory political and public messages about American workers, the de-professionalized working conditions of K-12 teachers (teaching as a service industry), and the increasingly antagonistic mischaracterizations of tenure and unions expressed by politicians, the public, and the media.

Structural criminality within the “collective shadow”: disaster capitalism and the globalization of ruling power

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to expand upon one theme in Richard Slaughter's The Biggest Wake Up Call in History (BWCH) – that of the “collective shadow.”Design/methodology/approachAlong with Slaughter, the author contends that the denialism indicative of strong negative reactions to the publication of Limits to Growth since 1972 is part of a larger problem within the collective psyche that must be understood and confronted.FindingsFor the first time in history, largely due to the emergence of global consciousness and, more recently, the advent of the internet, it is conceivable that authentic global democracy could emerge as an alternate network power, which challenges the structural criminality within the collective shadow, as well as the secret rule of the Empire Power Elite.Originality/valueThis paper exposes structural criminality within the collective shadow, its relationship to the advent of disaster capitalism, and its role in the emergence of a global ruling class.

Situational Analysis as an Avenue for Critical Qualitative Research

Hypercapitalism in the United States and globally has created neoliberal conditions that have reinterpreted notions of the public good as an entrepreneurial endeavor. In this current context, critical qualitative methods such as situational analysis combined with theoretical perspectives like Black feminist thought can provide activist methodological tools to expose and reenvision privatized constructions of the common good. In this article, we describe possibilities for using critical situational analysis to examine a broad range of complex conditions and provide examples of situational mapping from a study focusing on disaster capitalism and the privatization of the public education system in post-Katrina New Orleans. We then offer possibilities for using situational analysis to create new imaginaries for critical qualitative inquiry.

Monumentalizing disaster and wreak-construction: a case study of Haiti to rethink the privatization of public education

This paper is a theoretical effort to support but complicate critiques of disaster capitalism and neoliberal strategies to profit from public education. We put into conversation a discursive analysis following Michel Foucault and a spatial analysis following Henri Lefebvre that focus on monumentalized disasters. We argue that neoliberalism carries out its agenda of privatization through public spaces that are never fully dismantled. We draw on empirical research into spaces that exemplify the usefulness of our reading of neoliberal privatization, including aspects of post-Katrina New Orleans and a more thorough case study of a pre- and post-earthquake Haiti and its highly privatized education system.

Popular Cinema as Popular Resistance

Most of the readings of James Cameron's Avatar as a subversive film focus on the alleged critique provided by the film on predatory corporate capitalism, the destruction of the environment and the planet, the colonisation and annihilation of indigenous people, and the militarisation of the globe through the ‘security bubble’ generated by ‘disaster capitalism’. As such, the film has been read allegorically as an anti-corporatist, anti-capitalist, anti-militarist and anti-colonialist-imperialist text which champions the environment and the rights of indigenous people (and non-human animals) against the alliance of the military-industrial complex with science and technology. This article focuses on how the major interpretative frameworks of reading Avatar against the grain of the Hollywood blockbuster resonate with the Palestinian condition and therefore made the film popular with the Palestinian non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation and colonisation.

El Consenso de Wall Street

<p>Por más de tres décadas, las políticas del Consenso de Washington han sido empleadas en América Latina. Recurriendo a las tácticas de shock del capitalismo del desastre, y bajo la justificación de la teoría económica neoliberal basada en la austeridad, la región ha atestiguado una masiva transferencia de riqueza de la gran mayoría de la sociedad a una pequeña élite rentista. Este artículo analiza cómo el gobierno y los mayores bancos de Estados Unidos, autores intelectuales del Consenso de Washington, ahora están recurriendo a las mismas tácticas en Estados Unidos. Otra vez se está utilizando la crisis financiera para consagrar una transferencia masiva de riqueza y poder económico de todos los trabajadores a una pequeña, pero altamente poderosa élite financiera.</p>

The alleged sins of the modern business corporation archetype in shaping the “boom-bust disaster capitalism”. A free market economics reappraisal.

Moral hazard defines the situation when the rightful owners of scarce resources are hampered by their entrusted agents from allocating these resources as they see fit, the later ones speculating not only the ubiquitous asymmetry of information, but the limitations, as coming from various state regulations, that impede the free and as complete as possible design of contracts in markets. The modern business corporation is said to be a particular headquarter of moral hazard – on one hand, between shareholders and managers, on the other, between itself and third parties – all that due to the legal shield that the “limited liability”, as “unnatural privilege granted by the state”, gives, fuelling propensity to pure speculation, and thus sending capitalism to ruinous instability. In our article, armed with reasoning coming from the Austrian School inspired libertarian ethics of private property rights (a rigorously reconstructed extension of classical liberalism precepts), we tried to enable the idea that in the corporation organizational design there is, ipso facto, nothing to be seen as an abusive license, granted by the state, through “limited liability” facility. In the light of this reappraisal, the corporation, the one that “strictly acts in the free market”, and so respects the societal division of labour, third parties’ legitimate property rights, not abusing the privileging safeguards (such as monopoly, customs protection or public subsidies, that incite the corporate actors to adopt abusive behaviours), is considered a socially benign capitalist pivot.

In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society (review)

Reviewed by: In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society John Cloud (bio) In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society. By Mark Carey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. viii+273. $24.95. Melting and retreating glaciers are a critical motif in the science and contention of global climate change. For the most part glaciers are located distantly enough from human populations that their melting poses an abstract or largely symbolic threat, but this is not the case in Peru. The Andes are enormous, and they crowd the human populations into narrow mountain valleys that open and broaden into much wider but still confined defiles, which then wind their way to and over a plain to the Pacific Coast, where the largest Peruvian cities and most political power are situated. Humans all along these watersheds are both linked and divided by the glaciers perched [End Page 842] far above them. In modern history, more Peruvians have died or suffered horribly from glacial disasters than people in any other country on earth. Mark Carey’s story begins about 1940, immediately before the 1941 disaster in which a glacial lake named Palcacocha burst through its confining moraine dam and swept down and through Cojup Canyon and then scoured through the beautiful, rich center city of Huaraz, the capital of Ancash Department. In the immediate aftermath, a government commission of “glacial experts” arrived to examine the glacier and its context by methods very different from those used by the resident mountain populations, who had lived there many centuries at least. The experts produced “data” of a type that Carey could mine for a dissertation. Yet Carey’s research is so thoroughly grounded in extensive reconnaissance on foot in the Andes, and also expert knowledge of glacier science, that the reader can comprehend much about the complex geography of the Andes and the string of disparate human communities between the ice and the coast, from tiny shepherds’ camps and scientists’ tents at the foot of a glacier to the mountain Indian towns to the much larger and diverse valley regional cities, all the way to the distant city of Lima from which power flows, and to which money runs. In Carey’s view, the history of climate change in general and human “management” of glaciers and their vast stored water is really a series of power struggles, in part humans “against” the glacial disasters, but mainly between different social groups. These begin in the 1940s among local, regional, and Peruvian national sectors, but international forces, from European glacier scholars to Duke Energy, soon arrive. Carey starts from Naomi Klein’s concept of the “shock doctrine” which creates an overture for “disaster capitalism,” the processes by which both natural and unnatural disasters become opportunities for neoliberal aggrandizement and enormous profits to large global corporations. Carey sees a more nuanced process, in which both small players and giant ones can use disasters to advance their causes and secure comparative advantages. He calls this “disaster economics” in contrast. This level of theorization is all Carey wants or needs, so the reader is spared much tedious discourse about how a giant hunk of ice is in fact a “non-human actor,” etc. The book also features well-chosen historic photographs, and simple but reasonably satisfactory maps, which, along with the author’s excellent descriptions of place, help the vast majority of the book’s potential readers, who have never been near these wonderfully terrifying mountains, and probably never will be there. But the reader will come away with an insightful history, and the example of a broad approach to sociopolitical analysis of environmental problems backed by expert grounding in the fundamental sciences involved, which can be applied productively elsewhere. [End Page 843] John Cloud John Cloud is the contract historian of the Coast and Geodetic Survey at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Central Library in Silver Spring, Maryland. Copyright © 2011 The Society for the History of Technology