Contingency, crises & disasters: Broadening the research agenda

Abstract

The idea of contingency emphasizes uncertainty, the consequences of choice as well as our dependence on persons and events outside our control and ability to comprehend. The concept is thus integral to how we define and understand disasters and crises. Yet the way in which contingency informs research agendas is often restricted to a dialectic reaction to uncertainty, the unknown, and the uncontrollable. There is a tendency to explain or prescribe solutions based on an underlying impetus that champions certainty over chaos, knowledge over ignorance, and control over disorder. This type of thinking has been influential in shaping normative and epistemological research trajectories in crises and disaster disciplines, but it has also restricted the contours of what counts as acceptable research on disasters and crises. In this article, I demonstrate how alternative modes of inquiry can transcend this dialectic by producing knowledge in reception to – rather than in contention from—contingency. In an effort to find a middle road between overemphasizing contingency or necessity, critical realism is used to illustrate how uncertainty, the unknown and the uncontrollable can be recast as an accepted part of a stratified reality leading towards alternative ways of knowing and researching disasters and crises.