2. Refraction: An Epistemological Inflection

In The Racial Contract, Charles Mills to describes how the classic social contract undergoes a transformation - political, moral, and epistemological - under the racial contract. Mills suggests that epistemic systems can be structurally distorted, producing what he calls an “epistemology of ignorance,” a patterned, systemic exclusion of knowledge that supports domination. In describing this distortion, Mills uses the term refraction in his diagnosis for understanding how the social contract goes awry (Mills, Reference Mills2014, 9).

I want to borrow and slightly redirect that term refraction, not to describe a structural epistemic failure, but rather to name something subtler that occurs within frameworks already committed to justice. In contrast to ignorance produced by bad faith or institutional exclusion, a refraction is a small epistemic inflection, a slight misalignment in the use or framing of a concept that bends its trajectory just enough to obscure a crucial detail that limits its application in ways that can be crucial to the success of the theory or framework. I raise this idea provisionally, not to fully develop it here, but will elaborate the concept of refraction more fully in my forthcoming work.Footnote ¹

In The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change, Pascoe and Stripling carefully outline the different vulnerabilities, precarities, and costs experienced by communities depending upon where they are situated in the watershed. Critically, they highlight that the vulnerabilities and precarities allowed uplands and lowlands to deny their dependency on the backwater and shoreline. The most vivid example of this is through their detailed analysis of the crisis of care revealed by COVID. The problem of who would perform undervalued care labor so that “real economic activity” could be accomplished becomes a central concern for those in uplands and lowlands because they were unable to simply off-load care work on to underpaid nannies, home attendants, certified nursing assistants, and other caregivers who were sick, dead, or dealing with losses of their own. Pascoe and Stripling mark the epistemic and ethical dimensions of the COVID crisis for the entire watershed by noting the dependency of uplands and lowlands on the labor of the backwater and shoreline. By denying their relationality to the lower half of the epistemic watershed, the uplands and lowlands are ignorant of the very infrastructures of care that facilitate so many of the benefits available to the upper half of the watershed (Hoagland, Reference Hoagland, Shannon and Nancy2007, 95–118). Pascoe and Stripling note there is a parasitism built into the structure of the watershed. The metaphor of care drains is used to articulate the epistemic and ethical harms of the entire watershed structure, and its attendant parasitism, through care labor (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 67–8). Those in the uplands and lowlands are structurally able, with their resources and power, to push care labor downward onto the backwater and shoreline who are limited in their ability to reject such burdens. The structure of the watershed, its unseen care labor and costs to the “invisible” women of color who maintain it, creates an epistemology of ignorance specific to the care and caring that supports a society (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 42). The upshot here is that the upper half of the watershed is now experiencing a pinch of the crises the lower half routinely lives with. Through this new experience, the upper half of the watershed has an epistemic and ethical rupture in their worldview that potentially can serve as grounds for a more just society. Through epistemic and ethical dimensions of care, Pascoe and Stripling reveal the parasitic nature of social and epistemological systems infrastructure, showing how disasters can serve as a moment of clarity that creates the possibility of a more just post-disaster world.

The careful analysis of care labor during COVID, conceptualization of parasitism as a core function in the watershed’s maintenance, and connection of these to the epistemic and ethical injustices at the core of the watershed structure show that their work is attuned to the structural injustice in the lived realities of our social and epistemic worlds. Yet, even within this justice-oriented framework, a kind of refraction can occur. Their view of the disaster, while carefully attuned to difference and vulnerability, may inflect the full cost of disaster for the lower half of the watershed because it misses the broader harm. In doing so, Pascoe and Stripling obscure harm that is catastrophic rather than disastrous for the lower half of the watershed. The backwater and shoreline are nearly or completely erased by disaster. There is an existential cost that more forcefully distinguishes the experience of those in the backwater and shoreline from the uplands and lowlands. That more forceful distinction, which I will name catastrophe, is inflected in a way that results in the ontological harm being refracted out of Pascoe and Stripling’s framework. In practice, this results in obscuring crisis as structural compulsion, which might make refusal by the backwater and shoreline seem like an unethical position.

To be clear, refractions of this kind do not undermine the core of Pascoe and Stripling’s framework, but they do deserve to be noted, especially when the stakes of disasters involve how vulnerability and refusal function in the wake of social and epistemological rupture. In the next section, I want to lay out the strengths of Pascoe and Stripling’s theoretical framework. I will then highlight where I think the inflection point lies that shifts its trajectory.

3. Disaster: The Epistemological and the Ethical

Disasters are environmental hazards that occur suddenly and seriously disrupt communities, such that unplanned actions need to take place to handle that level of disruption (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 7). I emphasize disruption since that is the central harm caused when environmental hazards impact social and physical infrastructure. Environmental hazards are natural processes that have always existed, though human activity is altering their intensity and frequency. Storms, viruses, and earthquakes are functions of natural ecosystems that impact many different types of environments. Their existence alone is not enough to create a disaster. It is the design of social and physical infrastructure to handle the impact of such hazards that constitutes the other necessary condition. An environmental hazard becomes a disaster when social institutions fail to stop or limit its impact from disrupting society. A more insidious approach to disaster management is to distribute the disruption caused by its impact in ways that protect some while overburdening others. The result is that some combination of societal (in)actions and environmental hazards create environmental disasters (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 7).

Societal choice is crucial here because it increases the impact of environmental hazards. The scale, scope, and speed of hazards can multiply their disruptive impact. Scale is the amount of devastation caused “in lives lost, property damaged, or rights violated… scope is the global spread of devastation—whether city, country, or a continent… speed can be thought of as the suddenness… basically how fast it appears” (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, p. 6). Pascoe and Stripling note that while the spectacular visuals of death and destruction are where most of the attention lies, it is the things like “housing policy or healthcare infrastructure that create harm when impacted,” and how the scale of hazards truly takes their toll. The choices of society can distribute the impact on the geographic, socioeconomic, and spatial scales of the lower watershed while insulating those in the upper watershed.

The social infrastructure that redistributes harm to the most vulnerable is only half the story. The structural ignorance of the highlands and lowlands serves as the critical maintenance function of the injustices embedded in the entire watershed. Social vulnerability itself, along multiple intersecting axes is unequally distributed. This was made visceral during COVID-19 in the form of “essential workers” who needed to continue working, bearing the risk of death in order for vast majority of people’s basic needs of sustenance to be met (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 239–40). COVID-19 created crises on a scale of the everyday. The inability to outsource the necessities for survival exposed many in the upper watershed to forms of precarity they had previously been shielded from. These new experiences of precarity and uncertainty smash headlong into (social) epistemologies and interpretative systems that never needed to understand such situations. Thus, a massive epistemic and hermeneutic disruption follows. COVID-19 made the material the fact of a broader system whose epistemology is predicated on siphoning resources upward—time, money, health, and care—while pushing vulnerabilities—sickness, precarity, and mortality—downward. For those in the lower watershed, this was an atypical form of the precarity compared to what is usually experienced. COVID-19 was not the same type of precarity that we are accustomed to, but it is not foreign to live under constant threat.

Pascoe and Stripling’s key insight that disasters begin to disrupt traditional (social) epistemological logics and ethical orientations is correct. It makes those mainly in the uplands and lowlands see that the seemingly normative societal flows are actually interconnections that make the vulnerabilities of the backwater and shoreline vectors of vulnerabilities to the uplands and lowlands (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 73–4). The drains and sinks that usually absorb vulnerability are unable to bear their usual weight. The taken-for-granted “infrastructures of vulnerability” rupture to the point that the resiliency of the epistemic systems of the upper watershed collapses (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 76–80). That rupture reverberates through both individual and social epistemologies creating an openness to a new kind of knowing and ethical orientation in the world.

Pascoe and Stripling explicitly trace the processes by which disasters lead to the epistemological breakdown of the fictions held by those mainly in the upper watershed. For those that live in precarity already, the impact of COVID-19 exacerbated already existing precarities, or even worse, killed many people who lived in the backwater and shoreline. In this context, rupture is already the norm. What COVID-19 brought was the potential of cumulative losses upon the existing ruptures of their worlds. Thus, the losses are existential and catastrophic. The degree to which the backwater and shoreline experience the impact of the environmental hazard is different to such an extent that it is a distinct kind of event. It is a catastrophe. In the next section, I expand on this distinction.

4. Lost Worlds: Disasters and Catastrophes

Pascoe and Stripling’s text is entitled “Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change.” One of the theoretical foundations for their text is Catastrophe and Social Change, by Samuel Prince (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 4, 8). Catastrophe and Social Change examines the pre- and post-social systems along with the possibilities for social change after the destruction of Halifax in Nova Scotia from two military boats colliding, causing an explosion that destroyed major portions of the town. Pascoe and Stripling are thinking through disasters, while Prince is considering the event as a catastrophe. In this section, I make the case that disasters and catastrophes are different kinds of events. The difference between the two is an inflection point that bends the trajectory of Pascoe and Stripling’s framework such that it undertheorizes the harm experienced in the backwater and shoreline. Pascoe and Stripling argue that disaster ruptures the epistemological frameworks of those, mainly in the uplands and lowlands, who have been structurally made ignorant of them. For these people, the continuity of their lives in the world has fallen into question as the social, political, economic, environmental, and cultural systems that they relied on cannot function as they did. For those of us in the backwater and shoreline, such a crisis further adds weight to current conditions of precarity. A different problem arises when precarious systems become precarious.

Pascoe and Stripling note these existing conditions by articulating that the many in the backwater and shoreline exist in “everyday disaster” and “persistent precarity” (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024:109). Given that we already exist in disaster, the impact of COVID-19 or any environmental hazard cannot just be a disruption; rather it is an accumulation of disasters. The cumulative effect of living in persistent precarity combined with the impact of an atypically environmental hazard has the potential to significantly damage or destroy the very lives of those whose existence is already unstable. Such events may largely erode or completely erase the multiple worlds in the backwater and shoreline. I refer to this as an unworlding. I draw on the concept of “world” from Maria Lugones to describe the multiplicity of existence for women of color in the backwater and shoreline. I will connect Lugones’ concept of world to Sara Ahmed’s concept of comfort, specifically that “sinking feeling” to clearly show the embodied way I am conceptualizing worlds (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2013). To be clear, Lugones’ term is describing the lives of women of color. Therefore, in keeping with Lugones’ use of the term, I make this point only in reference to women of color (Lugones, Reference Lugones1987, 4). That does not mean that other residents of the backwater and shoreline do not experience such loss. Rather, my aim is to stay as firmly as I can, being a Black man, within the context of the frameworks I draw on. Additionally, there are certainly tensions between the work of Lugones and Ahmed, most notability the situated subject in their frameworks. I only intend to highlight how their convergence offers a way of understanding a level of loss that would be visible from both their works in different ways.

In her essay, Playfulness, “World” -Traveling, and Loving Perception, Maria Lugones offers a conception of the different “worlds” she, and other women of color, inhabit. A world in Lugones’ view is a real and materially grounded social reality that organizes meaning, value, identity, and relationships according to its own internal logic (Lugones, Reference Lugones1987, 9–11). Worlds make certain people and practices intelligible on their own terms. Worlds are lived-in and inhabited spaces—homes, neighborhoods, workplaces, schools—where women of color are recognized as full beings, where meaning arises through and between them, and where they can act as authors of their own self-identity. One feature of being in the “world” where self-authorship exists is the ease felt in such worlds, such that women of color might even be interpreted as playful (Lugones, Reference Lugones1987, 11). That feeling of ease reminds me of Sara Ahmed describing comfort in her text The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Ahmed introduces us to an embodied notion of comfort, which affects and effects being in a space. Such spaces are shaped for your body, your way of moving, being, and relating in space. Ahmed argues that we “sink in” to such spaces and they enable us to physically move about without friction, without having to constantly adjust or contort yourself to be legible or safe. Through ease and comfort, I connect Ahmed to Lugones to claim that worlds are those spaces where women of color are physically comfortable enough to author their existence.

Understanding the backwater and shoreline as worlds unto themselves, with worlds within them, all created and maintained by women of color provides a different inflection point for the impact of environmental hazards on the backwater and shoreline. Here, Pascoe and Stripling underestimate the harm of environmental impacts and its unworlding effects for women of color. There is a mismatch between their careful analysis of the vulnerability and way environmental impact can destroy or damage those lived-in spaces where women of color can be at ease. The spaces and places where things like kinship, land, physical spaces, social rituals/practices, and people are lost are also part of the vulnerability experienced by women of color in the backwater and shoreline (Lugones, Reference Lugones1987, 3–19). There is a slight inflection of their analysis that bends the trajectory of their framework away from the depths and richness of the worlds women of color inhabit. They are spaces where women of color find comfort; their loss leaves women of color with, and in, physically discomforting worlds (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2013, 146–48). These potential losses establish fundamentally different stakes as they are ontological and existential. It is those elements that differentiate disaster from catastrophe. For women of color in the backwater and shoreline, such losses do not merely call into question issues of continuity but rather question surviving in worlds where their comfort and ease are not present. Their plight is therefore ontologically different. Again, it is that difference that I argue is potentially catastrophic. This is not to valorize the persistent precarity that structures some aspects of life for women of color in the backwater and shorelines. Women of color still face great structural barriers within the confines of the backwater and shorelines (Gines, Reference Gines2017, 19–28). Nor am I claiming that the longsuffering of women of color is something that should be glorified. I merely hope to acknowledge the uncanny skill of women of color to create community in the direst of spaces that I have witnessed and experienced from women of color in my life.

5. Withdrawal: Ontological and Existential Loss

To be clear, Pascoe and Stripling clearly articulate that very different, very heavy costs that the most vulnerable experience as compared to their more privileged counterparts. What they do not do is emphasize the ontological degree of difference that distinguishes between kinds of impact. Despite not explicitly stating this difference, the distinction between disasters and catastrophes is hinted at in the narratives they use in the text. For example, the story of a survivor of the Mexico City earthquake, Doña Consuelo, says that the people who she managed as a volunteer coordinator have become her new family, “‘they are witnesses to my catastrophe, that’s why I can’t go back to Mazatlan” my emphasis (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024,130). Consuelo names her experience as a catastrophe, not a disaster. The catastrophe that Consuelo is referring to is the loss of her entire family, home, and kinship relationships (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 124). While it is unclear how Consuelo is conceptualizing the term, it is clear that the loss of one’s entire worldly relations raises issues that are ontological and existential in nature. Those issues are fundamentally different the experiences of the uplanders and lowlanders Doña helped coordinate during the earthquake.

In my view, nothing in this text encapsulates the ontological depth of loss more than the obliteration of lives and jobs of the (women) garment workers after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake: “‘forty thousand women workers lost their jobs in a matter of minutes… Evangelina could hear cries under the rubble’” (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 136). The earthquake caused 200 sweatshops to crumble, and 500 more were damaged, causing the loss of countless women’s lives. For survivors like Evangelina, the sweatshop served as a world where women of color can be self-authors. Well beyond its economics, the sweatshop was a material space where women of color engaged in practices of relationality, self-authorship, and play. It was a world whose governing logics, norms, and meaning-making were generated by and for women of color, where many women of color could “sink in.” Again, this is not to glamorize sweatshops or ignore the very real threats of violence women face in such environments (Elias, Reference Elias2005, 203–222). Rather, women of color have always created ways to survive together within violent worlds. The loss of these jobs, and the loss for women of color as a gendered class in the backwater and shoreline, cannot be understated. It is not the same as the collapsing infrastructures being experienced by most in the upper watershed. For women in the sweatshop, it is a structural undoing of the very conditions and spaces that make living in persistent precarity survivable. In the wake of the earthquake, any survivors will be forced into vastly more discomforting worlds, where survival, legibility, and self-authorship will be exponentially more difficult.

The ontological and existential threats to the backwater and shoreline portend the potential for catastrophic and existential loss. While Doña Consuelo and Evangelina chose to participate in activities that help build on the unique moment of epistemic and ethical openness of the uplands and lowlands toward a more just society, others might not be so inclined to join such solidaristic activities. For the women of color in the backwater and shoreline, epistemic withdrawal, that is the outright rejection of contributing their knowledge to any such activities, is also a live possibility. Where do those women fit in Pascoe and Stripling’s framework? Pascoe and Stripling are clear that they “make no claims about the duties of those in the backwaters and shorelines to diffract with and enter into knowing communities with those in the lowlands,” though they do state there are important questions about the duties of the oppressed to resist their oppression (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 282). Taking that position makes me ponder whether their framework expects women of color to participate in solidaristic activities, particularly their epistemic labor, that builds on the rupture happening in the upper watershed. Pascoe and Stripling establish collaborating with the upper watershed as the sole method of how society capitalizes on disaster to create new ways of imagining, new epistemologies, for a more just social structure. Yet, the catastrophic loss of Consuelo’s family or collapse of Evangelina’s worlds can just as easily justify their refusal to use their skills, contribute epistemic labor, or share their epistemic ingenuity. Is there space in Pascoe and Stripling for refusal? It is not clear where in their framework they consider whether Consuelo or Evangelina will simply refuse after experiencing such catastrophic losses (Simpson, Reference Simpson2007). Without such consideration, Pascoe and Stripling’s framework might function as a subtle form of epistemic exploitation rather than the basis of a more just society (Berenstain, Reference Berenstain2016, 571).

To be clear, I think this is the result of a slight bend, a refraction, in Pascoe and Stripling’s theorization that changes its intended trajectory. Their framework develops an epistemological account of social change that avoids reproducing the very logic of domination and crisis that prevents social change. Their work provides a new way to understand and shape a more just society.

6. Conclusion: On Refusing Solidarity

Pascoe and Stripling provide a compelling, justice-oriented framework for understanding how disasters present opportunities for reimagining society. However, a crucial tension remains: is there a subtle expectation that those in the backwater and shoreline will not refuse to participate in activities that capitalize on the potential for social change in disasters and catastrophes? Such actions come at a time of potentially catastrophic loss. The works of Maria Lugones and Sara Ahmed show that the ceiling for harm is much higher for women of color in the backwater and shoreline. Their experience can potentially be catastrophic with the loss of meaning-making spaces and connections where their existence is seen, safe, and self-authored. That is an ontological and existential harm that justifies outright refusal, including epistemic withdrawal and disengaging from any supporting activities during the time of crisis or after. Refusal is a real possibility that Pascoe and Stripling remain neutral on. This is not simply a theoretical problem as participation by the backwater and shoreline is critical to actually moving social, epistemological, and ethical structures forward. What happens in their framework if the women of color of the backwater and shoreline refuse? Is there framework dependent on the epistemic ingenuity of the lower watershed, particularly the shoreline, to save the parasitic upper watershed? These questions make me wonder whether there is harm built into Pascoe and Stripling’s epistemological framework, which they leave me to ponder.