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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Disasters Fast And Slow: The Temporality Of Hazards In Environmental History, Fiona Williamson, Chris Courtney
Disasters Fast And Slow: The Temporality Of Hazards In Environmental History, Fiona Williamson, Chris Courtney
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Popular representations of disasters tend to focus upon dramatic moments of chaos. They envision panicked communities desperately scrambling for safety as earthquakes reduce cities to rubble or lava turns villages to ashes. Yet disasters actually unfold on numerous temporal scales. Media reports tend to reduce disasters to discrete events, initiated on the shallow causal timescale of a meteorological fluctuation or seismic disruption. Social scientists, by contrast, have often sought to emphasise the processual nature of disasters—embedding causality in the deeper timescale of a community, in which risk and vulnerability build over months or years.2 Environmental historians elongate causality even further, …
Malaya's Greatest Menace? Slow-Onset Disaster And The Muddy Politics Of British Malaya, C. 1900–50, Fiona Williamson
Malaya's Greatest Menace? Slow-Onset Disaster And The Muddy Politics Of British Malaya, C. 1900–50, Fiona Williamson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
In 1948, a chilling statement from British Malaya’s Director of Agriculture, F. Burnett, made headline news. According to Burnett, unchecked soil erosion across hillside Malaya would soon render the country’s precious agricultural land infertile. Erosion had worsened considerably after the 1880s due to widespread, indiscriminate agricultural and industrial clearing. By the 1920s, it had become a sizeable socioeconomic and environmental issue, thought also to contribute to the scale and intensity of flooding and the likelihood of dangerous landslips. The British Government raised a series of empire-wide inquiries across the first half of the twentieth century, tied to an emerging global …
Plant Poetics And Politics Of The West Usambaras: Power And Memory Of Narrative Botanical Science In Kizanda, Sagara, And The Mazumbai Forest Reserve, Cameron Daddis
Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection
This is a story about people and plants. About the power of relationships between floral organisms and human lives. Using narrative botanical science as a methodological framework, this study highlights the power of local people’s ecological knowledge from the villages of Kizanda and Sagara in the West Usambara Mountains. Building from semi-structured interviews and personal conservations with thirty residents of these villages—voices of local healers, farmers, and forest guides—this work unfolds through a series of vignettes. Its aim is to identify both the precise yet diverse ways in which these people have developed botanical knowledge of their local environment. From …