2. Epistemologies of Resistance

Some of the central questions explored in The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change are what kinds of shared visions and frameworks make it possible to build collective, coalitional, and aspirational forms of action, and how we can identify those frameworks as they take shape during a disaster. At the heart of these epistemologies of resistance is what Lorraine Code calls an instituting imaginary: a way of seeing the world that enables deep social critique, challenging what is taken for granted, exposing the assumptions behind dominant ways of knowing, and making space for imagining alternatives. An instituting imaginary works by slipping into the cracks of dominant ways of knowing, exploiting breaks and disruptions to introduce new conceptions of what is possible. When these alternative visions help foster solidarity and build coalitions—Solnit’s “paradise built in hell”—they can ground what Alexis Shotwell calls aspirational solidarity: a solidarity that gives people a way to imagine the future together, rethink the present and past, and create lasting change.

Instituting imaginaries are not just alternative stories about the world, they seek to change how we know. Instead of simply presenting new perspectives, they challenge dominant ways of knowing. They are practices of thinking otherwise, harnessing the generative potential of disaster natality’s experience of newness and steering it toward a progressive future rather than giving in to regressively nostalgic or resilience-based visions of the post-disaster world. In so doing, they tap into the inherent possibilities for invention and innovation that emerge from the experience of disaster natality.

Pascoe and Stripling remind us that Marx famously compared revolution to a mole, quietly burrowing beneath history. On the surface, everything seems stable, but down below, the mole grinds away—mapping the land, understanding the roots and resources that sustain what grows above, and breaking down decay to nourish new possibilities. Like Marx’s mole, revolutionary ideas often remain underground, accumulating knowledge and depth until moments of rupture bring them to the surface. Disasters can act as these ruptures, either surfacing the mole or making the ground fertile for its emergence. What might seem like “new” revolutionary ideas in the wake of disaster often have long histories in hidden, subterranean spaces, built on deep knowledge and nourished by breakdown and decay. The authors’ point here is not that disasters create instituting imaginaries, but that they expose longstanding ones, creating the conditions for broader engagement and transformation.

What this amounts to, in practical terms, is an admonition to stop trying to reinvent the damned wheel. When we take seriously the knowledge and creativity of those living at the margins, it becomes clear that the tools and practices needed to navigate disaster often already exist, and that people are already putting them into action. adrienne maree brown’s podcast How to Survive the End of the World reflects this understanding, implementing a decolonial approach to disaster response by centering the wisdom and experience of those already doing the work: community organizers, healers, environmental and transformative justice advocates, farmers, and artists. Together, they offer a powerful collection of strategies for navigating crisis and building resilience.

brown’s work is grounded in a Black feminist approach she calls emergent strategy, which starts from the idea that since change and upheaval are inevitable, our task is to learn how to shape that change intentionally. She frames this as a struggle of imagination between a dominant vision rooted in control, violence, scarcity, and collapse, and a rising vision focused on transformation, collective power, and possibility. brown’s emergent strategy draws heavily from the Afrofuturism of Octavia Butler. Best known for her dystopian 1993 science fiction novel Parable of the Sower, Butler replaces the violent resistance typical of the genre with an epistemic resistance that insists on the importance of holding onto hope in the midst of collapse, forming coalitions in the ruins, and cultivating alternative visions of the future that can grow out of the wreckage.

Butler’s forward-looking brand of Black feminism has zero patience for nostalgia. Unlike political movements that look backward—whether through conservatism’s longing for a supposedly better past or liberalism’s promise to “build back better”—her approach recognizes that the past offers no safe refuge for Black women. There is no earlier era to return to, no historical moment that can be idealized or reclaimed. The central idea of Earthseed, the religion developed by Parable’s protagonist, is that because “God is change,” embracing and adapting to change is the sole path forward. Backward-looking nostalgia is thus superseded by forward-looking acceptance of the inevitability of change.

Butler made it clear that Parable was not intended as mere prophecy. Instead, she insisted, it was an exercise in imagining the world’s policies from the standpoint of those deemed expendable by them, and of coming to realize that their present reality is our collective future. Pascoe and Stripling characterize Butler’s approach to science fiction as a kind of standpoint practice, one that centers the experiences of the most vulnerable to reveal how the world actually works, and to forecast where it might be headed. (Prophecy might not have been Butler’s primary intent, but in her 1998 sequel Parable of the Talents, an authoritarian and populist president promotes white supremacy and Christian nationalism under the slogan “Make America Great Again.”)

Butler understood that society’s collapse would not come from a single catastrophic event but rather from the slow breakdown of interconnected systems—climate change, neoliberalism and privatization, mass incarceration, inequality, white supremacy, and misogyny. That the downfall of civilization will very likely be a death by a thousand cuts means that, in some sense, there is no clear line to be drawn between what counts as a disaster and what does not. And, ultimately, the distinction does not matter because the epistemic insights offered up by the instituting imaginaries of the marginalized stand to help all of us, right now, start imagining our way out of this collective mess. If Pascoe and Stripling are right, these practices of thinking otherwise are probably the best chance we have.

1. Another Instituting Imaginary: Partying as Resistance

Most of the concrete examples of instituting imaginaries that Pascoe and Stripling take up come from the work of Black feminists. In what follows, I want to further map the terrain carved out by Marx’s mole by turning to the ways of knowing of a different marginalized group, one that does not appear as much in the book’s analysis but with which I happen to identify: queers. I will explore, in particular, the deep wisdom to be found in a battle cry associated with the activism of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s:

The phrase captures the relentless cycle many queer communities endured: mourning friends lost to AIDS, demanding action and justice, and, just as crucially, finding joy and strength and community and defiance in partying. The resulting ethos—one that that blends grief, activism, and resilience in response to social stigma and government inaction—has all the hallmarks of an instituting imaginary: it challenges taken-for-granted assumptions, offers a powerful critique of the status quo, and opens up space for imagining new possibilities. In doing so, it fosters aspirational solidarity by helping its participants envision a shared future, reframe the past and present, and work toward real transformation. It offers a peek into the paradise queers have built in hell.

It is easy to see how mourning rituals and protest strategies could constitute elements of an instituting imaginary, but I imagine the partying might be a little harder for many to swallow. Skeptics might be tempted to write off the revelry as whistling past the graveyard (at best), or as fiddling while Rome burns (worse), or as evidence of the filthy degeneracy they always knew festered inside us perverts (even worse). But queers know that the debauchery, the catharsis, and maybe above all, the dancing, are integral parts of the formula, and we know that what is going on here is actual resistance. Taking unapologetic joy in bodies and desires that heteronormative society tells us are shameful is a radical act.

The long and illustrious queer history of partying takes many forms, but here I will briefly highlight three: drag, ballroom, and bars.

Drag: The drag queen Sasha Velour has referred to drag, variously, as “darkness turned into power” and “the art form of the queer imagination.”Footnote ¹ Drag’s dark power is to expose the instability of categories taken for granted by the mainstream. Through parody, satire, and exaggeration, drag’s hyperbolic and playful performances of gender reveal the absurdly limited set of options served up by what cisheteropatriarchy is willing to consider “normal.” When mainstream culture depicts queer sexuality as pathological or shameful, drag flips the script by putting queer desire, eroticism, and sensuality on full display, celebrating pleasure, flirtation, the beauty of non-normative bodies, and sexual expression. (To invoke another slogan from the 1980s and 1990s: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”) Drag humor and camp open up spaces to imagine other possibilities for living, being, and relating to others. It uses joy to crack open rigid structures of power and to invite people into new ways of seeing and understanding themselves and the world. Its celebration of self-expression, community, and unapologetic social presence is a form of resistance grounded in pleasure, imagination, and hope.

Ballroom: Ballroom culture’s role in the history of queer resistance is particularly significant for queer Black and Latinx communities. While drag culture has existed for centuries, the ballroom scene as we now know it began to flourish in the early 20th century in Harlem. These underground events offered a vital opportunity for self-expression, where participants could compete in runway categories, perform gender through fashion and movement, and embody personas that defied societal norms. In a world that denied queers—especially trans and nonbinary queers of color—either recognition or safety, drag balls created a space of belonging, celebration, and survival. They were sites of joy, defiance, and creativity, where performance functioned as both protest and liberation. The culture developed its own language, structures of chosen family (“houses”), and aesthetic codes. Documentaries like Paris Is Burning and songs like Madonna’s Vogue brought visibility to the scene (if also arguably, in Madonna’s case, cultural appropriation), while contemporary television shows like Pose and RuPaul’s Drag Race continue to draw from and reshape it. Ballroom participants assert truths about gender fluidity, queer desire, and Black and Latinx identity that push back against cisheteropatriarchal norms. They show that knowledge is not always propositional—it can be danced, walked, and lived. In so doing, ballroom does not just resist oppression, it reimagines reality, creating new frameworks for understanding identity, worth, and community from the margins.

Bars: In a world where queer identities are frequently misunderstood, misrepresented, or erased, queer bars are spaces where people can be themselves, share their experiences, and build collective understandings. The knowledge produced in these spaces—truths about gender, sexuality, desire, survival, and joy—is rooted in lived, embodied experience, not in academic or institutional validation. The alternative imaginaries that arise often do not conform to mainstream norms or expectations, as evidenced, for example, by the lesbian bars of Leslie Feinberg’s underground queer classic, Stone Butch Blues, whose butch–femme dynamic was at odds with the received wisdom of the second-wave academic feminism of the time, with its radical rejection of anything smacking of traditional heteronormative gender roles. Despite frequent and often violent police raids, bars have been some of the only places where openly queer people could gather, making them key sites of resistance in many historic queer uprisings (1969s Stonewall being the most famous example). Queer bars preserve and transmit cultural memory, acting as informal community centers, archives, and schools where queers can find role models, form chosen families, and imagine new ways of being. These ways of knowing cannot be sanitized for mainstream consumption: there is booze, drugs, and sex in bathrooms. And, as I will discuss more in a minute, there is dancing.

The queer partying wisdom found in drag, ballroom, and bars does not only provide examples of the unexpectedly creative twists and turns that instituting imaginaries are capable, however. It also, I worry, points in the direction of a potential concern that might plague Pascoe’s and Stripling’s entire project—and, potentially, virtually any mainstream attempt to engage with the marginalized epistemic insights that standpoint theory tells us to look out for.

4. Who Deserves this Knowledge?

Some of the central inspirations of The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change are Solnit’s paradise built in hell and Audre Lorde’s conception of “a now that can breed futures”, evidenced in the book’s commitment to exploring the ways in which disaster natalities can present an opportunity to fix broken systems, form meaningful coalitions, and foster solidarities that can result in real social progress. It is not, however, all disaster sunshine and disaster roses here. In addition to the obvious material devastations of disasters, Pascoe and Stripling recognize the perils captured perhaps most famously by Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine”: the chaos that disasters engender can present a political opportunity for authoritarians to seize or consolidate power.

Pascoe and Stripling are all too aware of the many political dangers lurking, and they have the good sense to ask many of the right questions here: “What happens when [instituting] imaginaries gain uptake among the privileged? … In whose hands is a revolutionary idea revolutionary? What does it mean to be accountable to the epistemic ingenuity of more oppressed survivors?” (204). By way of an answer, they point to Butler’s Parable of the Talents as a cautionary tale about what can happen when imaginaries of resistance are co-opted by the privileged. In this sequel to Parable of the Sower, we see Earthseed’s revolutionary ideals about accepting and adapting to change gain traction among the privileged members of society: those who have homes, armored cars, and access to money, institutions, and political networks. As these ways of knowing take root among those in power, they spark an interest in privately funded space travel intended to ultimately permit the wealthy to escape the havoc they have wreaked on Earth. The book ends with its protagonist boarding a shuttle ominously named the Christopher Columbus, leaving readers to question whether this departure represents a genuine effort at adaptation and survival, or if the vision of Earthseed has been co-opted by the privileged and repurposed into yet another chapter of colonization and empire.

So the authors are not completely silent on the question of what happens when resistant imaginaries are co-opted by the mainstream, nor are they unaware of the potential concerns here. However, there is a sense in which their concerns can feel like they are coming from the outside: from the standpoint of well-intentioned and progressive, but ultimately mainstream and privileged, theorists and practitioners. Let me try to give you a sense of what the same concerns can feel like from the inside.

I am not going to pretend there are never reasons—often very good reasons—for marginalized communities to be open to sharing their resistant imaginaries with those who are more powerful than them. Along with the affirmation of finally seeing yourself reflected in the world around you, there can be real political and material gains to be had. After centuries in the shadows, in the past 30 years or so queers (in many parts of the West) began to see unprecedented levels of visibility and acceptance. And real, significant, progress was made: the decriminalization of homosexuality; the legalization of same-sex marriage; gender recognition laws allowing legal name/gender changes; inclusion in military service; anti-discrimination protections in employment, housing, and public services; hate crime legislation; inclusion in asylum and refugee protections; adoption and parenting rights; access to partner benefits (healthcare, inheritance, taxes); coverage for gender-affirming and transition-related healthcare; broader access to HIV prevention and treatment; workplace protections and inclusive corporate benefits; representation and inclusion in media and marketing … a girl could go on all day! For at least some privileged queers, there was a sense that we had made it. And in that sense, letting the cishets peek into the darkroom of our queer imaginaries might have felt worth it.

However, for too many queers, the goal of acceptance slipped into assimilation. With assimilation came cooptation and commodification, where corporate marketing tactics like rainbow-washing and queerbaiting offered surface-level inclusivity while stripping queerness of its radical edge. This dilution reached its peak when multinational corporations started sponsoring Pride parades rebranded as family-friendly spectacles that welcomed cops while sidelining or banning nudity, kink, and leather. Empty slogans like “love is love” reduced the complex, intersectional fight for queer justice to a sanitized, apolitical catchphrase concise enough to print on a coffee mug. The priorities of the queers with the power to steer the movement shifted from helping those at the margins to focusing primarily on the fight for marriage equality, and once that was achieved, there came a sense that we were more or less done. Meanwhile, the violent and subversive history of queer activism was muted or erased as the pursuit of radical liberation was replaced by a version of queerness made safe for mass consumption. Just as Black communities have, for centuries, seen their resistant imaginaries appropriated, watered down, and sanitized by mainstream whites, queers began seeing the same.

However, getting the mainstream to accept this watered-down queerness was a pyrrhic victory, and that we have now seen much of this acceptance evaporate at the first signs of trouble comes as no surprise. The speed with which so many cishet progressives have been willing to throw queers (especially trans queers) under the bus in this new political moment makes all the sense in the world once you realize they were never interested in our revolution, they probably just wanted to be able to feel cool for having that one queer friend or to spice up the diversity of their kids’ PTAs.

This, I want to suggest, is why marginalized communities should be hesitant about sharing, and wary about the mainstream uptake of, our instituting imaginaries: there’s usually a lot more in it for them than there is for us. They wouldn’t be listening to us otherwise. That’s how power works.

And here is where my concerns about The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change lie. When Pascoe and Stripling frame the project as asking how the epistemic insights of marginalized communities might inform disaster response, there is a risk of characterizing the entire endeavor as a question about what “they” can teach “us.” But this, of course, implies that “they” are not “us.” This not only risks entrenching the outside status of marginalized communities, it also risks appropriating the insights gleaned from alternative imaginaries in ways that no longer benefit—and, in fact, might actually further endanger—the people responsible for them.

Here are some questions I wish Pascoe and Stripling had spent more time asking: What if the we’s-who-are-the mainstream’s-they’s do not want to share our hard-won ways of knowing? What if we worry they will be used against us? What if we do not think the mainstream deserves them, if we do not want to help those whose only real interest in us is extractive?

Pascoe and Stripling recognize that the process of translating instituting imaginaries into terms useful for disaster practitioners will not be straightforward. They admit that these alternative ways of seeing and responding to crisis are not ready-made substitutes for the dominant imaginaries already in place. They note that many counter- or infiltrating imaginaries are inherently experimental and grounded in specific local contexts, which means they might not easily scale up to broader systems or institutions. But I am concerned that they are not worried enough that these resistant imaginaries might scale up perfectly well, but will, in so doing, will no longer serve the interests of those they once belonged to.

My concerns here are not primarily practical. I am not terribly concerned to ask how disaster professionals can use these new-to-them imaginaries to inform better policies, procedures, and concrete responses; that is a question better tackled by Stripling and his fellow emergency management specialists. My concerns are primarily ethical, and so my questions are for Pascoe. I want to ask whether those in the mainstream have a right to ways of knowing that exist only because of an oppressive system from which they already enjoy outsized benefits. I want to ask whether the mainstreaming of these insights will dilute or destroy their effectiveness or meaning for those responsible for them. I want to ask: what’s in it for us?

We need to recognize that there is something about at least some counterimaginaries that makes them effective only oppositionally. If we share them with the mainstream, in other words, they stop working. By way of a representative example, let us return to queer partying—which, remember, I have argued is an instituting imaginary that is anything but trivial.

There is no denying that even cis straight people can reap many of the benefits of partying—even science backs it up. House music’s steady beat of 120–130 BPM has been shown to facilitate “brainwave entrainment,” a process that can shift the central nervous system to a more regulated state, thereby reducing stress and anxiety (Yang et al., Reference Yang, Su, Xie, Su, Huang, Han, Zhang, Zhang and Xu2025). This kind of dancing also activates the parasympathetic nervous system: its repetitive movement encourages the release of endorphins and serotonin, promoting a state of calm and well-being; the deep breathing often associated with these movements helps activate the vagus nerve, supporting relaxation and emotional regulation; the flow states that arise when fully immersed in its rhythms can lower cortisol levels, reducing stress and promoting nervous system balance (Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Yanqun, Yifan, Jutao, Liming and Mingxuan2024).

However, the most meaningful insights of this instituting imaginary resist easy translation into terms that are comfortable or possibly even legible to mainstream audiences. Scientific explanations seem absurdly beside the point here, while descriptions that gesture toward embodied or transcendent knowledge risk sounding clichéd or reductive. I am the first to admit that the above attempts to capture the queer magic of drag, ballroom, and bars very likely fell short, coming off as flat, stifled, and disconnected from the lived experience I aimed to describe. Ultimately, these instituting imaginaries might operate in registers that do not lend themselves to conventional academic analysis, especially within traditions like analytic philosophy. If that is the case, then the above effort to translate them might itself be misguided. Some knowledge might not be meant for this kind of scrutiny, or for this particular audience. Maybe the mainstream is not to be trusted with them.

I am not going to devolve terribly far into autotheory here, I assure you. However, I will say that when the imaginary of partying as resistance gets co-opted by the straight mainstream, in my experience, it very often ruins both the party and the resistance, and devolves into a night of getting stepped on by creepy bros who cannot hold their drugs. As a queer femme, the vibe completely shifts in a room where straight men look at you like food and straight women look at you like competition. It is pretty much impossible to fall into a flow state when your guard needs to stay up to protect yourself from the possibility of sexual harassment or violence. It is hard to meet people when you are not sure whether the guy complimenting your outfit is being friendly or hitting on you, and you do not know which girls might welcome being hit on. Something is lost when straight people, even well-intentioned allies, take over queer spaces.Footnote ²

Channeling the hopeful visions of Shotwell’s aspirational solidarity and Solnit’s paradise built in hell, Pascoe and Stripling often write with the assumption that when privileged survivors begin to recognize how their own experiences of disaster are linked to the everyday precarity faced by marginalized communities, the result will be greater empathy, solidarity, and a genuine commitment to justice. However, I fear there is just as much reason to predict the response will be considerably darker. At times, the book’s emphasis on the transformative potential of resistant imaginations risks slipping into an unrealistically optimistic idealism.

We need to acknowledge how power actually works. We need to acknowledge that the post-disaster competition for scarce resources is usually a zero-sum game. From a more cynical standpoint, members of marginalized communities very often have no reason to trust that this sharing of imaginaries will be equal or reciprocal, nor that the mainstream imaginaries we stand to gain in return will be of much use to us if they only work in the preexisting conditions of inequality in which we have already drawn the short end of the stick.