Pascoe and Stripling’s The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change (2024) is the insightful and energetic dovetail of disaster (response/management) sociology and feminist epistemology. For the most part, it successfully engages both fields in a unified voice, though there are places where that voice trembles. Though when it works, the voice makes full-throated insights about what disaster is, how and what we think/do when we think of disasters, and why, and how to think and respond differently. A key claim Pascoe and Stirling explore and build upon is about the nature of disasters. In short, there is no such thing as a natural disaster. All disasters are the product/result of human construction. More specifically, all disasters are the result of systems of oppression and parasitic use. Disaster is “harm made visible”; disasters exploit and excavate social inequity and oppression (6–8). What we come to understand as a disaster is conditioned by epistemic practices—ways of knowing—that reflect one’s social location.

As Pascoe and Stripling use Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” as an anchoring metaphor for their project, this response focuses on Lorde’s understanding of the relationship between poetry, knowledge, and survival to critique the disaster imaginaries offered here. First, I look at Lorde’s account of survival and how that bears on “A Litany for Survival.” Then, I move to Pascoe and Stripling, who focus on the “survivor” to suggest that they frame “survival” within a fixed—if not limited—temporality that undermines both the disaster epistemic they offer via the paravi. A more accurate use of Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival”—and a more fruitful starting point for the paravi—is one that goes beyond a social epistemology focused on the survivor and toward a phenomenological epistemology of surviving.

To engage with a poem is to engage with phenomenological situations (of both the reader and the poet). In “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Lorde says poetry is “illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt” (SO, 36). Lorde creates and offers an epistemology that explicitly emerges from lived experience, a way of being in the world grounded in non-propositional and “nonrational” feeling that is transformed into language, thought, and action. Lorde’s poetry is the “distillation of experience” (Lorde, Reference Lorde2007, 37). There is no knowledge project that is not always-already a life project.

The poem is the predicate knowledge of experience. It is not a reflection upon or representation of action. It is the use of one’s life. Many of Lorde’s poems come from journal entries. These entries, rather than explicit drafts of poems, are often sketches, recollections, dreams, and fragments. They are the initial transformation of feeling into language; feeling to be made use of as living. In a 1982/1983 interview with Claudia Tate, she talks about this process.

Because poetry (art) is the use of life, the poem, for Lorde, is necessarily transformative. Lorde’s identification of an “us” who seeks “a now that can breed futures,” is an identification of the capacity for embodying—through the inhabitation—the possible. In this way the possible directly overlaps with the now of lived experience. Lorde’s poetry is the transformation of the actual into the virtual in her poetry.

Having spent time among Lorde’s journals, I believe this is true. She is far less straight forward journal-er/chronographer or straightforward drafter than one might expect. Yet, the way her teenaged entries about Genevieve and “The Branded” are transformed into the identity projects of Zami are incredible. She transforms the disastrous into something else, into some knowledge for future use, for a future to use. In, “Poet as Teacher—Human as Poet—Teacher as Human” and “Poetry Makes Something Happen” she doubles down on the inextricability between one’s life (one’s way of being in the world) and one’s creative/knowledge work (Lorde, Reference Lorde, Byrd, Cole and Guy-Sheftall2009a).

Reading/using “A Litany for Survival” as a representation of experience dissolves what I take to be a very real, immediate, and thick understanding—for Lorde—of the relationship between poetry and being in the world. In a 1983 interview with Karla Jay, she says, “Being a poet is not only a question of what you produce. It’s a question of a whole way of seeing oneself moving through the world and seeing the world through which we move” (Lorde & Jay, Reference Lorde and Jay2004, 111). Being a poet is a way of being in, of, and at a world. The work of the poet is to distill rather than abstract from experience. That is, a poem (for Lorde) is a standpoint. Pascoe and Stripling appear ready to take this observation seriously as they deploy standpoint epistemology as one of their central analytics. Standpoint epistemology allows the authors to “understand how the situation of each disaster survivor contains what they can know” (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 25).

But what does “situation” mean in the authors’ account? For Pascoe and Stripling, the situation appears to be limited to a physical/geographic location. On one hand, it makes sense to think about disaster in terms of space. Given my current location, I do not include tornados as part of what I imagine a disaster to be. But to suggest that my disaster epistemology is solely or even primarily location-dependent (or location-referent) is to ignore the way that I inhabit locations and the ways they inhabit me. My way of being in the world is, yes, a way of being in location, but it is not location as a way of being such that a change in location initiates a change in my ways of knowing. I still know that a bacon-egg-and-cheese is the superior breakfast sandwich (if not breakfast food) even though it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve been a bodega regular. That is, my situation is the ongoing development and retention of knowledge practices; as such, it is more thorough-going than an epistemic resilience that aims at status quo (78–81). Attention to the situation must be attention to the constitutive relations between habitat and habituation. I am wary of what appears to be an attempt to abstract habit from habituation—to separate out parts of the knower—in this text. In “Self-Definition and My Poetry,” Lorde writes, “My friends, there will always be someone seeking to use one part of your selves, and at the same time urging you to forget or destroy all of the other selves” (Lorde, Reference Lorde, Byrd, Cole and Guy-Sheftall2009c, 157). In “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” she writes, “My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition” (Lorde, Reference Lorde2007, 120–121). To take up “situation” using Lorde as an analytic touchstone and attempt to separate out parts of one’s situation is to ignore key components of Lorde’s epistemic project. One’s physical location vis-à-vis disaster is meaningful in terms of being not just knowing because “survival is not an academic skill” (Lorde, Reference Lorde2007, 112). “[S]urvival is not theoretical. It is a day-to-day living decision, and one that you make over and over again. You can’t be theoretical about survival. You live it in too many ways” (Chawla & Lorde, Reference Chawla, Lorde and Hall2004, 119). Survival and survival epistemologies are not, for Lorde, primarily thought projects. That is, one cannot think their way into an epistemology that differs from their habits/life projects.

I fear that despite intentions to the contrary, Pascoe and Stripling offer theories of survival. An example of this is in their account of the “epistemic watershed” (90–102). While the chart is useful, easy to read, and gloriously sparse with the jargon that characterizes many of the other sections that take up disaster sociology, there does appear to be an unnecessary trend toward treating the epistemic “regions” as disconnected from stance/phenomenological situations. Pascoe and Stripling turn to the watershed as a structural device so that they can address key features of both our ways of knowing and how our ways of knowing condition our ways of apprehending and responding to disaster. Per the authors, a watershed is the result of human design. Specifically, this design has an unequal and inequitable distribution of benefits, “a watershed is designed to benefit some more than others… it is designed to benefit some,” (90). Watersheds are in a constant process of un/doing mediated through methods of sense-, meaning-, and patten-making practices (90–92). This is important for the authors in their analysis of epistemes within and of disaster.

To this end, they develop and deploy an account of “The Epistemic Watershed” that offers four “regions”—uplands, lowlands, backwater, and shoreline—complete with their epistemic injustice type and their proposed remedy (92–104). Those in the “uplands” region are those for whom the watershed was immediately and predominately designed to benefit. This region has the most to gain from understandings of disaster that prioritize a return to the status quo. Those in the lowlands serve the watershed and are served by it. However, they face reduced credibility and first order epistemic injustice through the deprioritization of their knowledge. The backwater region is the region that performs/provides the bulk of the labor for the watershed while simultaneously experiencing a disproportionate amount of risk, harm, and neglect when the watershed is threatened or fails (and when it works well). The backwater region is a region that was designed to receive the brunt of the storm. By design, this region is overlooked in terms of the possibility of participating in knowledge projects and faces a second order of epistemic injustice—hermeneutic injustice. Finally, there is it the shoreline region. They describe this region as “outside either the benefits of conceptions of the watershed; they can’t be understood within the watershed and, not trapped by its conceptions, can develop separate forms of understanding” (93). This region experiences the most pernicious epistemic harms—contributory injustice—given their outsider status; yet it is this outsider status that Pascoe and Stripling attempt to make use of as the starting point for their paravic practice (99–102).

Yet, Pascoe and Stripling take up a reading of “A Litany for Survival” in their watershed epistemology that is neither supported by the poem nor by Lorde’s understanding of poetry, transformation, and survival in a way that undermines their project in Chapter 10. Specifically, they state, “Crucial to our idea of flux, standpoints are locational, not personal. A person stands at the shoreline; they are not a shoreliner” (94). To my mind (from my situation), this statement can only pass as sense if one from the uplands is committed to ignoring their ways of being in/at the world, their habitual practices and relations, and their inhabitation of the upland as the way their lived body accomplishes itself. Location is personal. (Location is not total; that is, one’s way of being is not totally the effect of their location. However, one’s location plays a constituting role that is demonstrated in day-to-day decisions.)

The watershed epistemology account that offers these regions as just locations (100)—particularly the shoreline—undermines the possibility of developing new or transforming existing epistemic practices. For the shoreline epistemology to be of use—and even here I am deeply suspicious of what this use entails when we reconsider that the watershed contains the uplands and lowlands—those at the shoreline must be able to participate in projects of survival that are simultaneously life projects (living projects) of transformation. While Pascoe and Stripling may be correct about the watershed not benefiting the shoreline(r), I am unconvinced of their characterization of the relationship between the shoreliner and uptake (99–102) because they reduce the otherwise practices of the shoreliner to its usefulness for those in the up- and low-lands. I find it curious and troubling that Pascoe and Stripling turn to Blues as an example of an “epistemological tool” that demonstrates a “kind of tragic opportunity for the experience of the shoreline to share meaning within the Watershed” (102). One: Blues is not merely tragic, or tragedy writ large. Two: Blues would not be for or in service of the watershed. Blues is particular pitch complex for, at, with, and about a particular ontological and phenomenological situation (Warmack, 2024). The dominant disaster imagery predicated on the levee/watershed that Pascoe and Stripling deploy blocks the very epistemic humility (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 136) and subversive lucidity (139) necessary for their project.

The watershed epistemology relegates survival/navigation of disaster to an academic skill. It is a skill that can be acquired through the choice to occupy a different location. Yet, Lorde’s poem is not talking about an occupied space, but a community, a personal community. Lorde’s use of “we” and “us” is instructive/intentional. Think about what it means when Lorde writes, “For those of us who live at the shore line/standing upon the constant edges of decision/crucial and alone.” Those of us who stand upon these edges do so as a lived habit—a habit of living—an orientation to this fundamentally in-process space. The day-to-day living is embedded in the situation of persons/communities. I read Lorde as confronting us with a situation in which stance is not a theoretical pretense (that is, a stance for or against something) that allows for a depersonalized, disembodied thought, but a keenly felt lived experience, a condition for the possibility of knowledge. Certain folks seek, create, and take off-ramps because of their situation not simply because they are physically located near an off-ramp. An uplander “slumming it” in the backwaters is still an uplander. What this means is that something more than a temporary change in location is required for a change in knowledge habits. So, while it is possible to read “A Litany for Survival” the way Pascoe and Stripling via this abstraction, the question is why?

Moreover, despite their turn to “flux,” Pascoe and Stripling fix survival to a discrete timeline. The text’s focus on the survivor engages an account of survival in the past tense (28, 112). This is the consequence of framing their episteme in terms of natality. Natality has fixed temporal points—beginning and end. In this case, before, during, and after. Despite the flowcharts that do assign epistemic status to categories of the during (105–118), the text operates under the assumption of disaster as a teleology. Pascoe and Stripling offer a “linear progression of epistemic change” that emerges from the “Myers Phases,” linear developmental accounts of disaster (106–109). Disaster natality is predicated on discrete (developmental) milestones that make survival a tidy, inevitable, foregone conclusion (if one just stays alive long enough) (110–118, 123–125). While this discretion might work to underpin the notions of “off ramps” and the tendency to uphold and repair the status quo (160–161, 171, 178, 182–183, 190) in favor of the “pathological normal” (65–66), it reduces the “mythical norm” (Lorde, Reference Lorde2007, 116) to a mere developmental stop (or location) with attendant and predictable behaviors.

Unfortunately, the authors’ use of “A Litany for Survival” to center shoreline epistemologies in their best practices for disaster natality, denies the shoreliner’s status as surviving, or inhabiting a durée (Al-Saji, Reference Al-Saji, Weiss, Murphy and Salamon2020). If we take seriously the insights the authors make about disaster as constructed and what follows in the wake of that construction, I suggest that we also ought to consider that responses to disaster and even the conception of what is understood as disaster is less a cut and dry series/stages of development, and something murkier. In so doing, we have cause to push back again the notion that survival and transformation are discrete (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 217). It is an attempt to “drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas” (Lorde, Reference Lorde2007, 38).

Even with the productive insight/reframing of disaster as a result (of human design), the authors frame disaster as a result that is only evident upon reflection. Their discussion of disaster, disaster response, and disaster epistemology is always already contingent upon the past tense. There is no capacity to identify or respond to the duration, the unfolding, or the living within what may come to be known as disaster. There is no way to hold the uplander and lowlanders responsible for their parasitic relations. So, even as we see the paravi as an attempt to set the stage for new practices of understanding/knowledge, the focus solely on the survivor reproduces uplander epistemology. While, on one hand, this is practical. The dead struggle to make themselves available for questioning. On the other hand, it impoverishes the epistemic community. The truncation of the epistemic watershed, the disaster timeline, and the paravi to the survivor is a testimonial silencing of the dead. Testimonial silencing of the dead creates instances of hermeneutic oppression of both the dead and the living and squanders the possibility of the shoreliner. The currently dead were once surviving. Their surviving, knowing, doing, and being help shape the disaster imaginaries of the survivors. As such, they are credible knowers. I am not suggesting that we involve ghost whisperers, mediums, or psychics. I am suggesting that we take seriously what it means that certain structures and features of our epistemic practices are inherited (from people who are no longer alive). Chapter Five’s discussion of disaster epistemology via the 1985 Mexican Earthquake might provide Pascoe and Stripling with such an opening. The authors prioritize the testimony and credulity of a survivor, Alonso Garcia, rather than his coworker, who is not a survivor, Virginia. In this case, it means paying as much attention to Virginia—given no last name—as to Alonso Gonzalez in the reframing of the 1985 Mexican Earthquake. Notably, it is Virigina, not Alonso, who recognizes the trembling of the wall decoration as an earthquake. It is Virginia’s role as an embodied knower that makes it possible for her knowledge to be used by Alonso for his survival (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 110–112). Even if we take seriously the use of the Myers Phases, the framing of these knowing practices, are impoverished by neglecting Virginia.

It is Virginia’s response to impact that makes Alonso’s response possible. What Alonso learns from Virgina creates the epistemic conditions for his disaster natality. There is no transformation for Alonso without the surviving—even if not for longer than a few moments—of Virginia, in which she transforms impossibility of anything happening on a run of the mill Thursday morning, into the conditions for Alsonso’s survival. Thinking with Virginia is akin to Hartman’s method of thinking/living with the enslaved (Hartman, Reference Hartman2007, 169–170). Thinking with those who did not survive, or who survived prior to our survival is to inherit and transform their heuristic to make sense of our world. Our surviving is coextensive with (the threat of) our death and the lives of the ancestors. They create the atmosphere of our da-to-day living. Surviving is no less transformative than survival. After all, a litany for survival is a petition from those busy with the transformative work of surviving. We lose important epistemic resources when we limit our framework to linear survival—via the survivor—without considering that the very situation of standpoint epistemology requires the careful negotiation of relations and lived experience. So, what if we read, the last line “we were never meant to survive” literally? In such a reading, there is no past tense, no survivor, only the shoreliner who is surviving (who is doing, being, reframing, and transforming by speaking).

While I applaud the authors for doing the work of providing concrete suggestions—which so rarely happens in philosophy, so huzzah!—for entering the paravi, their understanding of the relationship between transformation and survival undermines the journey. For this reason, I oppose the characterization of “A Litany for Survival” as evidence of Lorde “thinking about the tension between survival and transformation” (217). While Lorde does write, “There is little time to think of anything other than physical safety and survival” (73) in “Of Generators and Survival—Hugo Letter” (Reference Lorde1991), the line immediately following that, “We have stepped out into a world forever altered,” can be read to suggest that survival may be tension filled, it is not opposed to transformation. Specifically, what Pascoe and Stripling appear to understand as survival is bare life—bare necessities—and that is covered by “physical safety.” That Lorde considered physical safety and survival as what was crucial, Day One post-Hugo, does not mean one, that physical safety means the same thing as survival (for Lorde), or two, that survival is not transformation. Lorde’s article is rich. It is easy to see the ways in which Pascoe and Stripling use it to underpin their project. However, I am not sure that it makes the stark contrast that the authors make between survival and transformation, particularly if we pay attention to the moments of pleasure, delight, relief, and joy that are concomitant with the admixture of exhaustion, worry, grief, fury, and grind (74, 75, 76, 78). What this means is that the day-to-day decisions of survival are found in these transformations of the given into the created. In a journal entry dated March 8, 1990, she writes:

Every day of the 6 months post-Hugo, Lorde and Claudia engaged in making a new life via the day-to-day decisions of survival. Surviving means that the work of making decisions, of transforming the given toward the possible, to speaking (via the written word) as a knowledge project is ongoing. These transformations are not because Lorde is suddenly in a different location, or even that the features of her location have changed, but because she has habits of being in/at the world, making sense of the world that are distinct phenomenological locations rather than just epistemic locations.

The paravi is an attempt to “adap[t] toward the future rather than recovering the past. It accepts that change and crisis are ongoing, not occasional” (Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024, 220). Their approach appears to be non-hierarchal.

How is this adaptation possible if it attempts to disambiguate survival and transformation for the shoreliner? Surviving as a shoreliner is the constant (crucial) transformation of the habitual self in through and with one’s lived experience and perception. When we regard the transformation as an active choice somewhat contingent upon and apprehended within reflection, we ignore the practical lived aspect/demands in the third stanza of “A Litany for Survival.” This stanza is an extension of the terms of the second stanza in which Lorde lays bare the phenomenal structures of our knowledge worlds. In stanza three, she outlines some of those responses before offering her own best practice.

We speak because we were never meant to survive. We speak of about our surviving (in our poetry) as the distillation of experience, the use of life, the transformation of the disastrous into ways of being as knowing. The paravi does attempt this, through refreshingly clear, discrete, and straightforward survival logic. Yet, this logic abstracts from the day-to-day living decisions of surviving and ultimately renders it a new, but no less disastrous imaginary.