E-raamat: Public Catastrophes, Private Losses

"There are many sorts of catastrophes, ranging from devastating fires, floods, and earthquakes to sexual violence, genocides, and wars-but this collection of feminist essays focuses upon three broad types: epidemics/pandemics, anti-Black racism, and climate breakdown. These are public catastrophes, profoundly shaped by government action and inaction. The essays reveal that it is impossible to fully understand-or challenge-the structural harms associated with public catastrophe without appreciating their personal dimension, or reckoning with the ways that power thoroughly conditions our experiences as individuals and as members of communities. The public and private are intertwined, and during catastrophes, families and communities become repositories forloss, silence, mourning, witnessing, reconstruction, and reparation. The essays in this collection examine how public catastrophes imprint themselves on lives, how individuals, as members of groups, narrate, process, and grapple with legacies of loss, and how, though both attention or neglect, governments and nonprofits frequently exacerbate preexisting vulnerabilities"--

From COVID to climate-change-induced wildfires and hurricanes, we live in an era when catastrophes have become the new normal. But even though these events affect us all, some members of society are more vulnerable to harm than others. 
 
This essay collection explores how the definition of catastrophe might be expanded to include many forms of large-scale structural violence on communities, species, and ecosystems. Using feminist methodologies, the contributors to Public Catastrophes, Private Losses trace the connections between seemingly unrelated forms of violence such as structural racism, environmental degradation, and public health crises. In contrast to a news media that focuses on mass fatalities and immediate consequences, these essays call our attention to how catastrophes can also involve slow violence with long-term effects. 
 
The authors also consider how these catastrophes are profoundly shaped by government action or inaction, offering a powerful critique of how government neglect has cost lives and demonstrating how vulnerable populations can be better protected. The essays in this collection examine how public catastrophes imprint themselves on lives, as individuals and communities narrate, process, and grapple with legacies of loss. The book is thus a feminist intervention that challenges the binary between public and private, personal and political.

The essays in this collection expand the definition of catastrophe to include not only events like pandemics, hurricanes, and wildfires but also slower-moving phenomena that have equally disastrous long-term consequences—like environmental degradation and structural racism. This book is a feminist intervention that challenges the binary between public and private, personal and political.