S10E5 - Black Power, Black Scholarship, and Disaster Justice

Episode overview Episode 5 centers Black power and Black scholarship as foundational to understanding disasters, vulnerability, resistance, and justice. Through a wide-ranging conversation grounded in lived experience, political struggle, and long-term community engagement, the episode examines how Black intellectual traditions reshape how disasters are understood, studied, and responded to.

Hosts

• Jason von Meding

• Ksenia Chmutina

Guests

• Danielle Rivera — Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley; scholar of environmental and climate justice working with rural and unincorporated marginalized communities

• Dewald van Niekerk — Professor at North-West University (South Africa); founder and editor-in-chief of Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies; leading scholar of disaster risk in Southern Africa

Key themes

• Black scholarship as central—not peripheral—to disaster studies

• Structural racism, historicity, and the “disaster before the disaster”

• Community resistance, agency, and epistemologies of survival

• Ubuntu, mutual support, and collective responsibility

• Rejecting colorblind and event-focused disaster narratives

• Long-term engagement versus extractive disaster research

• Bridging scholarship, practice, and policy

Core discussion highlights

• Danielle Rivera discusses Clyde Woods’ work on the Mississippi Delta, emphasizing the importance of deep, place-based scholarship that traces disasters through long histories of structural racism, political economy, and resistance.

• Woods’ concept of “the disaster before the disaster” is explored as a way of understanding disasters as outcomes of deliberate abandonment and plantation logics rather than isolated failures or surprises.

• The conversation challenges dominant disaster narratives that center elite losses while marginalizing the experiences of poorer and racialized communities.

• Dewald van Niekerk reflects on his engagement with Black Consciousness thought and the work of Mamphela Ramphele, highlighting kindness, dignity, and community as starting points for resilience.

• Ubuntu is discussed as a philosophy emphasizing interdependence, shared humanity, and collective problem-solving—offering important lessons for disaster risk reduction and recovery.

• Both guests critique paternalistic and technocratic approaches to disaster management, arguing for community-led, non-extractive, and context-sensitive engagement.

• The episode reflects on the evolution of disaster studies, calling for deeper interdisciplinarity, stronger links between theory and practice, and greater honesty about power, inequality, and history.