Geoscience Reference
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singular fl ood hazard, Mustafa (2005) argued, creates the material geographies of
differential vulnerability and exposure in the urban hazardscape.
Such a post-structuralist perspective was used by Simpson and Corbridge (2006)
to explore the politics of reconstruction and memorial practices that emerged after
the 2001 earthquake in western India. Treating post-earthquake reconstruction as
an exercise in place making, both discursively and materially, they illustrate how
competing elite visions of Hindu nationalism and regionalism, manifest themselves
spatially while silencing other memories of schedule castes and Muslims. The spatial
production of exclusionary post-disaster geographies is likely to have profound and
largely negative consequences for a multi-ethnic/religious country like India. In a
similar vein but half a world away, Cupples (2007) cautions against strategic essen-
tialism of gender sensitive disaster relief and reconstruction through a case study of
post-Mitch reconstruction in Nicaragua. Beyond the negative material outcomes of
disaster situations for women, which must be addressed through relief and aid,
Cupples (2007) argues that attention must also be devoted to spatial shifts brought
about by disasters so as to reveal new opportunities for women.
On the technological hazards side, Ulrich Beck takes the production of new,
uncontrollable hazards from technological development to be the defi ning feature
of our emergent 'risk society'. While science once delivered a sense of predictability
and control over certain risks, e.g., traffi c accidents, by making them probabilisti-
cally calculable and hence insurable, we are now entering a new age, according to
Beck (1996), of widespread public recognition of the risks produced by technologi-
cal progress itself:
The hazards produced in the growth of industrial society become predominant. That
both poses the question of the self-limitation of this development, and sets the task of
redefi ning previously attained standards (of responsibility, safety, control, damage
limitation and distribution of the consequences of loss) with reference to potential
dangers. These, however, not only elude sensory perception and the powers of imagina-
tion, but also scientifi c determination. (pp. 28-29)
Public recognition of these new risks is helping to spark a new, more refl exive kind
of modernisation associated with new forms of 'subpolitics' that operate outside
and beyond the institutions of the nation-state.
Concerns about climate change illustrate many of Beck's claims about the risk
society. Because of its anthropogenic origins and its global scale climate change is
a mega technological hazard beyond the scope of traditional means of probabilistic
calculations, insurance-based risk spreading, and damage limitation. Faced with
deep scientifi c uncertainties about its likely extent and effects, conventional struc-
tures have struggled to cope. Into the breach have stepped new transnational forms
of subpolitics, centred around environmental movements and new institutions of
science, like the IPCC. To date, however, these efforts to address climate change
have not resulted in much progressive socio-environmental change. Indeed, if any-
thing, existing relations of power and international dominance have been reinforced
(Bulkeley, 2001).
Though infl uential, Beck's risk society thesis is not without its critics (e.g.,
Bennett, 1999). The distinction between lay and expert knowledge is at the core of
Beck's formulation of refl exive modernisation and risk society. While agreeing with
the main thrust of Beck's arguments, Wynne (1996) uses the example of the sheep
in Cumbria, England, contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear
