Data, Disasters, and Space-Time Entanglements

Eija Meriläinen; Mirka Koro

doi:10.1007/s13753-021-00333-x

Volume 12 Issue 2

Dec. 2021

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Eija Meriläinen, Mirka Koro. Data, Disasters, and Space-Time Entanglements[J]. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 2021, 12(2): 157-168. doi: 10.1007/s13753-021-00333-x

Citation:

Eija Meriläinen, Mirka Koro. Data, Disasters, and Space-Time Entanglements[J]. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 2021, 12(2): 157-168. doi: 10.1007/s13753-021-00333-x

Eija Meriläinen, Mirka Koro. Data, Disasters, and Space-Time Entanglements[J]. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 2021, 12(2): 157-168. doi: 10.1007/s13753-021-00333-x

Citation:

Eija Meriläinen, Mirka Koro. Data, Disasters, and Space-Time Entanglements[J]. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 2021, 12(2): 157-168. doi: 10.1007/s13753-021-00333-x

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Data, Disasters, and Space-Time Entanglements

doi: 10.1007/s13753-021-00333-x

Eija Meriläinen^{1,2
,
,},
Mirka Koro³

1 Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and Institute for Global Health, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK;
2 Department of Management and Organisation, Centre for Corporate Responsibility, Hanken School of Economics, 00101 Helsinki, Finland;
3 Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA

Funds:

We would like to express our gratitude to the many people who have contributed to this work. We are thankful for the two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped us improve the paper substantially, as well as the editors and copyeditors who pushed the paper a notch further still. Also Nikodemus Solitander, Ilan Kelman, Isabell Storsjö, Minchul Sohn, and Tiina Jääskeläinen particularly deserve a nod/bow/curtsey for their helpful comments along the way. This research was supported by Konkordia-liitto, Hanken Support Foundation, and the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Grant Ref: NE/T013656/1.

Available Online: 2021-12-25

Abstract

Abstract

Disasters connected to natural hazards can at the same time be unfolding events, as well as structural phenomena with unequal disaster risk constructed over an extended timespan. Hence, in disaster studies, temporality and spatiality are central, yet often implicit, concepts employed to make sense of the disaster phenomena. In this article we explicitly focus on temporality and spatiality within qualitative disaster studies, particularly those containing ethnographic elements. We use Doreen Massey’s idea of space-time trajectories to analyze and illustrate how in qualitative disaster studies the trajectories of the disaster, research participants, and the researcher entangle in diverse ways. The focus is on how temporality and spatiality are present in the construction of data. The article is mainly conceptual, with illustrations drawn from empirical fieldwork on Valparaíso fire of 2014 in Chile. We interrogate how researchers’ sensitivity to temporality and spatiality challenges the conventional notions and practices of “data” in qualitative disaster studies. The focus in this article is on disaster studies, but it also offers methodological insights to other social sciences that strive to conduct research in the era of “Anthropocene,” with all its shifts and changes, the root causes of which have built over a long time.
- Chile,
- Creata,
- Data,
- Disaster studies,
- Qualitative disaster research,
- Space-time

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References(88)

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