Disaster, Gender and Knowledge Production. A Feminist History of Social Science Disaster Research, 1949-1989

During the Cold War, several newly established, at least partly army-funded US-American social science disaster research groups conducted several hundred field studies on “human behavior” in earthquakes, factory explosions and “racial riots”, both in and outside the US. In my paper, I will elaborate on how the scientists’ research goals and findings but also their methods were shaped by as well as (re)produced interwoven categories of gender, race, class and able-body/able-mind-ness. First, I will explore how the effect of gender differences and inequalities on individual and community reactions to disasters became a research object for the scientists, and what their findings were in this regard. Second, I will analyze the researchers’ scientific practices and show how the work within the groups was gendered, how the interactions among scientists and between researchers and the people they studied were influenced by the performance of heteronormativity, and how the production, circulation and loss of knowledge were deeply coined by gendered epistemic standpoints. In my analysis of publications and archival documents (including texts and pictures), I will interpret the history of disaster research in the larger context of changing Cold War-forms of governmentality. My feminist history of knowledge approach combines discourse analysis and praxiography, it has a focus on entangled histories and is inspired by queer- and crip-theories that are interested in the materiality of bodies and things.