2. The Epistemological Fluidity of Disaster

The first (physical) disaster of the second era of Donald Trump was the interconnected set of firestorms that blazed through L.A. in January of 2025. The largest of these, the Eaton Fire, started on January 7^th, the swan song of the Biden era, but it burned throughout the second Trump inauguration. By the time it was extinguished, on January 31, 2025, it had consumed 80% of Altadena, a traditionally Black, middle class, enclave of artists and scholars, unincorporated, just north of Pasadena. In this sense, the Trump era began with the American dream of historic progress already burning.

It burned just up to the gates of the cemetery where Octavia Butler – writer of challenging, Black feminist science fiction – lays buried, but did not cross them (Haskell, Reference Haskell2025). In Parable of the Sower – her dystopic novel set in a fictionalized version of Altadena, Lauren Olamina, Butler’s own disaster hero, writes “We had a fire today” to start her post-apocalyptic journey. The book was written in 1996, but Olamina’s first journal entry is dated February 1, 2025. Butler did not consider herself a prophet (Butler, Reference Butler2000; see Pascoe & Stripling, Reference Pascoe and Stripling2024), but as Altadena burned, the commentariat certainly positioned her as one.

As Altadena burned, Olamina’s mantra from Parable of the Sower echoed in Nikki High’s mind, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.” High is the owner of the bookstore Octavia’s Bookshelf, located three blocks from Butler’s home. Evacuated from her own home, High offered her bookstore as a relief operation. Her neighbors came for water and wifi, then for community and healing, then, later, for organizing and advocacy anchored in Butler’s own hometown vision (Gamson & Dickerson, Reference Gamson and Dickerson2025). Nikki and her colleagues operated as what we call in our book disaster doulas, working to guide disaster impacted areas toward a liberatory recovery by providing a space for knitting together mutual aid and advocacy work already happening within the community.

Six months later, in the summer of 2025, Altadena has lost the feel-good spirit of the early mutual aid days. Predatory lenders abound, corporate-guided redevelopment is underway, and at least 100 homeowners have sold their properties and left (Ionescu, Reference Ionescu2025). Federal disaster support – never efficient – is dragging. Altadena is in the midst of what Adrienne Maree Brown has called an “imagination battle” – a battle over how, and with what concepts, we want to imagine the future (Brown, Reference Brown2017). The imagination of public policy and disaster capitalism point in the direction of “build back better” nostalgia. The groups convening through Octavia’s Bookshelf practice strategies of survival and mutual aid that envision a more connected community, a more affordable, and liberatory future.

We understand this battle as a fundamentally epistemological one, but the stakes play out in lives and livelihoods. Our epistemic analysis of this battle aims to address a persistent gap in the sociological and historical literature on both social change and the practice of disaster. Thus, we draw on the work of Walter Scheidel, a historian who posits that societies can only become more equal after catastrophes that create great loss of life – generally wars or pandemics (Scheidel, Reference Scheidel2017, Reference Scheidel2024). Scheidel traces his argument through human history, using taxation records and other financial sources from the Peloponnesian wars, the Black Death, the 1918 pandemic, the World Wars, and other sources to posit that either high death counts or (sometimes) “radical policymaking” triggered by catastrophe could lead to more equal societies. But his analysis provided little by way of tools or data for determining how and why such policymaking occurred in catastrophic contexts.

Since Scheidel’s book was published in 2017 – and particularly in the wake of Covid-19 – multiple scholars have engaged with his thesis. Van Bavel and Scheffer, using data unavailable to Scheidel, show that many disasters actually increase inequality through wealth takeover (as in Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” (Klein, Reference Klein2007)). However, they are able to give a clearer account of an alternate possibility. “Exceptions to this tendency,” they write, “occurred in periods when the self-organization of ordinary people and associated institutions had grown and empowered these people to overrule this pattern. In such settings, shocks have been windows of opportunity for setting new rules that “made the ball roll the other way,” toward more equity.” (van Bavel & Scheffer, Reference van Bavel and Scheffer2021).

Another analysis of crises over the last half century shows that disasters prompt an outpouring of short-term democratic practices, such as marches, less self-censorship, and more media critique of government (Povitkina et al., Reference Povitkina, Jagers, Rydén and Sjöstedt2025; see also Arcaya et al., Reference Arcaya, Raker and Waters2020) – many of the things that we describe in our book. They show that disasters do sometimes produce regime change, but this regime change is sometimes both toward and sometimes away from greater democracy, and they cannot say why. “Our results,” they conclude, “only imply that natural disasters open a window of opportunity and carry the potential to bring about political change, and the direction of this change will depend on the antecedent conditions and agency after the event” (Povitkina et al., Reference Povitkina, Jagers, Rydén and Sjöstedt2025, 16).

This scholarship demonstrates that disasters can and do produce social change, for better and for worse, through both “bottom-up” and “top-down” mechanisms (Povitkina et al., Reference Povitkina, Jagers, Rydén and Sjöstedt2025; Scheidel, Reference Scheidel2024). It also shows that the more fiercely “ordinary people” can seize the moment, the more the crisis is likely to lead to more societal equality. If not, wealth will become more concentrated in the hands of the few.

The gap, which our book addresses, is how and why radical ideas gain uptake and new coalitions form in disaster to drive this social change toward more societal equality. As von Bavel notes, “Indeed, those dynamics are challenging to capture, as they are driven by a complex set of processes on multiple timescales” (van Bavel & Scheffer, Reference van Bavel and Scheffer2021). We attempt to answer this challenge by providing an epistemic account of this democratic theory of social change across a complex set of processes on multiple timescales. We draw on both disaster sociology and social epistemology to explore how and why disasters trigger new collective understandings of the world that shape social movements and social change.

To do this, we map how epistemological change is triggered by disasters and the many potential policy outcomes linked to this flux. We begin with the well-documented fact that disasters cause a perceptual shift amongst survivors: we argue that survivors experience what we call disaster natality as the familiar world around them abruptly shifts. This natality leads to perplexity (Medina, Reference Medina2013), as (many) survivors realize that their existing conceptual resources are insufficient to make sense of the world reshaped by the crisis. This leaves survivors casting about for testimony and hermeneutic resources to make sense of this emergent experience; this is the epistemic dimension of the urge to solidarity well-documented in disaster sociology (Drury et al., Reference Drury, Cocking and Reicher2009, Reference Drury, Carter, Cocking, Ntontis, Guven and Amlôt2019; Solnit, Reference Solnit2010).

We draw on the resources of standpoint epistemology to explore these dynamics. While disaster theorists have long recognized that one’s location in a disaster shapes one’s perception of it (Quarantelli, Reference Quarantelli1989), the insights of standpoint epistemology have only recently begun to shape disaster research (Alburo-Canete, Reference Alburo-Canete2024; Elliott et al., Reference Elliott, Reed and Fletcher2023). We aim to make the insights of standpoint theory accessible to non-philosophers, positioning them as an essential toolkit (like logistics) for disaster practitioners. To this end, we build a heuristic to help us trace the epistemic interactions that can be generated by disaster. This heuristic necessarily oversimplifies the infinite permutations of intersectional positionality, while at the same time adding nuance to the binary between privileged and marginalized standpoints that is still often deployed even in social epistemology frameworks attendant to the complexities of oppression (Fricker, Reference Fricker2007; Medina, Reference Medina2013). Drawing on Kristie Dotson’s account of epistemic oppression, we elaborate four general standpoints through the heuristic of a watershed. A watershed is, like our epistemological system, a human-made resilient system that manages and distributes resources unevenly, creating systemic patterns of injustice. Following Dotson’s account of the “orders” of oppression in an epistemological system (Dotson, Reference Dotson2014), we sketch the dynamic interactions between those who inhabit the uplands, lowlands, backwaters, and shorelines of our epistemic watershed. Our heuristic tracks how one’s relation to both the resources and the labor required by our epistemic watershed informs both one’s self-understanding and what one is in a position to know – and in doing so, it shapes what kinds of collective resources are produced across the epistemological disaster community.

As disaster theorists, we understand a watershed as a system that can be abruptly destabilized: watersheds are designed so that when flooding occurs, those in the “uplands” are protected from impact, while those in the “backwaters” are hardest hit. This heuristic allows us to examine the ways that disasters both impact and destabilize different standpoints disparately and thus to think about standpoints and collective knowledge production as both shaped and disrupted by crisis. Our heuristic provides a dynamic account of shifting relationships between standpoints as crises prompt rapid shifts in conditions, creating what we call epistemic opportunities, as new coalitions form and new voices can be heard (testimonial opportunities), radical concepts gain uptake (hermeneutic opportunities), and formerly heretical critiques of our dominant imaginaries become emergently salient (contributory opportunities). Tracking the uptake and circulation of such radical ideas is essential to understanding how and why broader social change occurs.

This account draws heavily on the resources of both epistemic oppression and standpoint epistemology – but as disaster scholars, we are attuned to understanding epistemic positionality in moments of rupture, which can destabilize fixed identities, relations, and credibility economies and have a profound impact on our critical consciousness. Our watershed heuristic calls attention to the ways in which standpoints are not just multidimensional, as intersectional theorists have long argued but also temporally shifting. Such shifts reflect both the unstable ground on which we stand as knowers and the ways in which the salient features of our location can shift depending on context, circumstance, and the credibility economy in question.Footnote ¹ Our analysis aims not to erase the phenomenological or lived dimensions of standpoint but to make space for the ways in which our perspectives, communities, and social locations can be in flux.

Andrea Warmack is right to point to the ways that standpoints are highly “personal” in the sense that they reflect our habituation, our phenomenological experience, and our self-making projects. In making the claim that standpoints are locational, we follow Sandra Harding, who argued that if standpoint theory is to be capable of generating knowledge in support of liberatory social change, then standpoints cannot be reducible to identity (Harding, Reference Harding2013). If our identities determine our standpoint, then there is no room for the ways that experience, relationships, and moral commitments can lead us to develop new kinds of awareness, habits, and political commitments (Toole, Reference Toole2024). Accordingly, we call attention to the ways that our social locations “prime” our awareness and our cognitive habits in important ways, but we also leave space for occasional, hard-won fluidity, for the ways that knowers can cultivate new habits and forms of awareness as a result of joining epistemic communities with others (Pohlhaus, Reference Pohlhaus2002) and the cultivation of critical consciousness (Toole, Reference Toole2024). Unsurprisingly, these questions have been most thoroughly explored in philosophical analyses of social movements, which have often explored how radical ideas are crafted in marginalized communities and gain uptake across wider coalitions through practices of consciousness raising (MacKinnon, Reference MacKinnon1989), protest (Medina, Reference Medina2023; Moody-Adams, Reference Moody-Adams2022), and other kinds of activism (Davis, Reference Davis2016; Fard, Reference Fard2024; Zheng, Reference Zheng2022).

We treat disasters as laboratories in which to study these kinds of epistemic shifts, which occur rapidly in both hyper-local contexts and, as we saw with the uptake of both the Movement for Black Lives and Stop the Steal/MAGA movement during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, at a massive scale. These cases illustrate what recent scholarship has demonstrated: that disasters do increase democratic activity and shift political coalitions. We argue that this is because disasters create epistemic opportunities, in which voices and ideas circulate, leading to political and cultural radicalization. As Covid19 taught us, the epistemic openness of disaster can yield liberatory, solidaristic forms of radicalization – but it can also lead to January 6^th. The sociology shows that disasters shape change, but the normative question is how we practice disasters in order to shape this change for good, rather than for ill. We argue that attending to the epistemic ruptures disasters generate and then tracing the flux of epistemic change throughout the disaster cycle can give us valuable tools both for designing disaster policies and practices that support liberatory social change and for understanding the epistemic mechanics of liberatory social change more broadly. Our goal, in doing so, is not to suggest a linear account of social change but to clarify the complex dynamics and patterns that generate new collective understandings and the epistemic underpinnings of broader social change, both in and beyond disaster.

Our critics propose two rich additions to this framework, which we heartily endorse. First, Andrea Warmack points to the ways that disaster scholarship and practice – including our own – commit testimonial injustice against the dead, and in doing so, devalue the lessons of survival they offer. We prioritize the testimony of survivors, and in doing so, we devalue and exclude the forms of survival practices by those who do not – who were never meant to – survive. As Warmack points out, this is another way in which disaster scholarship and practice might learn from Black feminist methodologies, particularly in Saidyia Hartman’s expansion of the archive to include both the dead and those systematically erased from it (Hartman, Reference Hartman2008, Reference Hartman2019). A few disaster scholars are attempting this work of un-silencing, notably Isomae Jun’ichi in his account of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster of 2011, Listening to the Voices of the Dead (Isomae, Reference Isomae2024). As Warmack notes, the dead are often the initial protagonists of disaster natality.

Second, as Kwabena Edusei argues, when oppressed communities are hardest hit by disaster, they can face what he calls ontological extinction – making the impact of the disaster catastrophic.Footnote ² Edusei’s intervention both provides a lexicon for making epistemic sense of the ways that oppressed communities – those we name in the backwaters or on the shoreline – can experience an “unworlding” through disaster: he takes the example of Dona Consuela, whose work in solidarity with others after the Mexico City earthquake came at the cost of the loss of her entire family, kinship network, and neighborhood – a cost much higher than that borne by the survivors with whom she was in solidarity. While we emphasize the ways that Dona Consuela’s familiarity with the disastrous everyday provides her with resources of survival her more privileged compatriots lack, we consider Edusei’s conception of complete eradication as an ever-present specter as an important epistemological addition and deserving of future work.

In particular, we think that Edusei’s argument is a powerful frame for thinking about the costs of response: often, the ontological extinction experienced by the most oppressed disaster survivors is as much the result of response policies as of the disaster themselves. After Hurricane Katrina, poor residents of New Orleans were often evacuated to other cities and left without the means of return; the loss of community, of home, of the worlds in which one has made oneself is absolutely the kind of catastrophic ontological extinction Edusei describes. In Los Angeles, the transfer of land from poor communities of color to wealthy real estate developers is producing precisely this kind of catastrophic impact on communities unmade by the wildfires. In these cases, there is the rupture of the disaster, and then the second rupture of response: the destruction of communities in the name of evacuation, and of schools and housing in the name of recovery, the harms shaped by parasitically privileged survivors mining your community for the epistemic and creative resources to grapple with their own (temporary) crisis.Footnote ³ The language of ontological catastrophe is a particularly valuable resource for naming the ways that response and policy choices extinguish worlds already ruptured by disaster.

Taken together, these tools expand an epistemological framework for the study of extreme events which can be descriptive (as in understanding what happened during Covid-19 and how it led us to this place), predictive (that is, it can generate ideas about how future disasters will impact society given certain epistemological inputs), or normative (how one should respond to a disaster to achieve certain ends). Our colleagues raise critical questions about our normative argument, which proposes that centering the epistemic ingenuity of the marginalized to reshape disaster practice can shape liberatory social change. The questions they raise point to important moral dilemmas in our project, and in projects of epistemic justice more generally.

3. Parasitic Privilege and the Ethics of Uptake

Most projects within social epistemology that take up questions of injustice and oppression have generally presented the uptake of formerly excluded voices and ideas as a salutary goal. If epistemic injustice and oppression are the result of systemic patterns of prejudice, exclusion, and silencing, then shifts in relevant credibility economies and epistemic practices that lead to greater uptake and circulation of marginalized voices and ideas mitigate the harms caused by such silencing and exclusion (Fricker, Reference Fricker2007), generate beneficial forms of epistemic friction (Medina, Reference Medina2013), and expand and rebalance collective epistemic resources, including our social imaginary (Dotson, Reference Dotson2014; Harding, Reference Harding2013).

As others have pointed out, however, such projects of epistemic justice are not without costs (Alcoff, Reference Alcoff1991; Davis, Reference Davis2018; McKinney, Reference McKinney2016). Our colleagues emphasize those cases where the uptake and circulation of epistemic resources cultivated by the oppressed is not salutary: they correctly ask, what about cases when uptake does harm, and when the oppressed or marginalized might rightly resist the uptake of their epistemic resources and practices? What about, in other words, those cases where uptake can in fact exacerbate epistemic injustice and oppression, through practices of mining, extracting, appropriating, infiltrating, and commodifying epistemic resources crafted by the oppressed? In making these arguments, our colleagues name a problem that often gets lost in social epistemology: that there is a violence to uptake, an erasure to circulation and solidarity. They identify the ways that, as we argue in the book, when the (epistemic) labor of the oppressed is co-opted by the privileged, the increased resilience that the privileged enjoy by drawing on these resources is a kind of parasitic resilience. This is as true with epistemic labor as it is with other kinds of disaster labor.

In the book, we explore such patterns in our Chapter 7 discussion of the widespread uptake of the arguments advanced by the Movement for Black Lives at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Building on important work by Emmalon Davis (Reference Davis2018), Nora Berenstain (Reference Berenstain2016), and Rachel Mckinney (Reference McKinney2016), we trace the forms of epistemic extraction and appropriation that occur when epistemic resources crafted within social movements that center marginalized perspectives get widespread uptake. When this happens, dominant epistemological systems tend to assert their resilience in these ways often leads to significant backlash and direct harm to those communities whose testimony and conceptual resources trigger such shifts in the first place (Dotson, Reference Dotson2014). We have certainly seen this with the backlash to the Movement for Black Lives since 2020 (as well as with other social movements, including the MeToo movement and the movement for trans rights). As we argue in the book, these patterns are both scaled and speeded up in contexts of disaster, as we saw in the tumultuous second half of 2020, when key conceptual resources (“racism is a virus,” “defund police”) from the Movement for Black Lives gained rapid, unprecedented uptake with white Americans who were newly susceptible to arguments about the brokenness of systems revealed by the Covid-19 pandemic. These conceptual resources were appropriated and distorted through processes of what Olufemi Taiwo has called “elite capture” in ways that often directly harmed the communities that crafted them (Táíwò, Reference Táíwò2022) – and in the ensuing and ongoing backlash, these harms have multiplied exponentially.

There are difficult and devastating ethical questions here, which our colleagues are right to take up. As Hay worries, there are the direct harms experienced by communities who find their own carefully curated practices of survival infiltrated, appropriated, and transformed by a dominant culture that feels entitled to take and distort the “good” parts for its own purposes. As Warmack argues, arguments for drawing on the epistemic ingenuity of marginalized communities to reimagine the possibilities of survival can operate like straightforward defenses of such appropriation: not a movement toward epistemic justice, but an old-school colonial project, mining marginalized communities for strategies of survival, which are then valued only insofar as they produce survivors. And as Edusei points out, even when such epistemic uptake is done with good intentions, the epistemic resources cultivated by the marginalized can be refracted through the epistemic lenses of the privileged, leading to distortions and misalignments that both limit their application and obscure uncomfortable parts of their insights. They demonstrate that a serious ethical problem for both our theory and for standpoint theories more generally is that when epistemic resources crafted by the marginalized gain uptake in more privileged spaces, it is often the privileged who benefit from an expanded repertoire of such resources, and the marginalized who bear the costs of extraction, appropriation, infiltration, and backlash.

Given the very real concerns about the harms that follow from the centering and uptake of epistemic resources curated by the oppressed, it is reasonable to argue, as our colleagues do, that those who are oppressed might have good reason to resist sharing their ingenuity or participating in solidarity with the parasitically privileged, even in moments of crisis. We argue that, given these harms, there can be no obligation for those who are oppressed to offer the fruits of their experience and ingenuity in these ways; there is no duty to be in solidarity with or to aid in the liberation of those who are parasitically privileged and likely to perpetuate such harms. As Hay has powerfully argued in earlier work, the oppressed have (imperfect) duties to resist their own oppression – not to liberate anyone else (Hay, Reference Hay2005).

This critique troubles the assumption, common to much feminist epistemology, that moments of uptake and circulation remedy the harms of silencing and exclusion and produce more inclusive and just forms of knowledge. A paradigmatic example is the way that, when women’s testimony about sexual assault gains uptake, it can mitigate the epistemic harms experienced by women who have previously been silenced, and it expands our shared understanding of sexual assault, which has been hampered by these exclusions. Of course, reporting sexual violence is not without significant risk, and there are differences of emphasis about how to balance this risk with the epistemic benefits of uptake within feminist epistemology. Theorists of epistemic injustice emphasize the personal benefit to the previously silenced women, naming the ways that, as Dotson puts it, such silencing is a form of epistemic violence (Dotson, Reference Dotson2011) and, as Fricker argues, harms excluded knowers “in their capacity as a knower” (Fricker, Reference Fricker2007). Uptake of this testimony, in this telling, allows healing for those silenced by epistemic violence and provides some measure of justice in terms of the minimization of these harms. Standpoint epistemology, on the other hand, attunes us to the kinds of shared knowledge that gets produced when patterns of silencing and exclusion are remedied; its defense of “strong objectivity” holds that greater justice and inclusion generates better knowledges, and that one reason (though not the only reason) why silencing and exclusion are bad is that we collectively end up trapped within epistemologies of ignorance – e.g., ways of knowing that actively misunderstand the world (Mills, Reference Mills1997).Footnote ⁴ Standpoint epistemology attunes us to epistemic justice in terms of the ways that better epistemic practices lead to better shared epistemic resources. This idea of justice is less focused on the impact of epistemic oppression on any given knower, and more attuned to the ways that greater epistemic justice reshapes collective epistemic resources and so shifts the conditions of knowing for all knowers. Both considerations of justice are important. In crisis situations, they will conflict in ethically uncomfortable ways.

In particular, these two conceptions of epistemic justice will deal with the practices of coalitional and democratic deliberation quite differently. Our colleagues emphasize the costs to marginalized communities when their carefully crafted epistemic resources gain broader uptake and are appropriated, infiltrated, and refracted through that process. Part of the worry here – particularly as Hay and Edusei articulate it – is that through uptake, these epistemic resources are both taken out of the hands of those who crafted them and transformed into something else. They are right to emphasize the harms, and the threat of ontological extinction, that follows from this. As epistemic resources crafted by the marginalized circulate, much of this transformation is appropriative and refractive, shaped by patterns of injustice and oppression, and we must, as Hay reminds us, be realists about how power works.

But we must also make room for the ways that the democratic uptake of ideas inevitably transforms those epistemic resources even as it transforms “common sense.” One reason to take seriously the project of charting epistemic interactions across standpoints is that, as testimonies and concepts travel, they shape patterns of epistemic friction (Medina, Reference Medina2013) as knowers engage and contest these ideas. In disasters, survivors often find themselves working in (temporary) solidarity with others, recognizing that their own survival hingers on these emergent communities (Drury et al., Reference Drury, Cocking and Reicher2009; Solnit, Reference Solnit2010). Such communities can operate as what Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. calls knowing communities, such that by “working together to change social conditions that maintain an inequitable distribution of general epistemic authority,” diverse communities can establish “relations of…trust, credibility, and responsiveness” across the barriers of privilege (Pohlhaus, Reference Pohlhaus2002). While many scholars emphasize that such relationships can only move “at the speed of trust” (Brown, Reference Brown2021; Whyte, Reference Whyte2020), we explore the ways that disaster conditions can produce epistemically rich practices of solidarity. This generates what Pohlhaus calls “struggle-with,” which includes deliberations between diverse actors with shared goals.Footnote ⁵ When concepts and ideas travel within and across knowing communities, they are subject to debate and deliberation; they are tested against what already passes for “common sense” – and often, in disaster contexts, they puncture and reshape those conceptions of “common sense.” The nature of this process, however, is not fully captured by the idea of “uptake,” which can suggest that the ideas or concepts in question remain untouched. We emphasize the ways that democratic processes of uptake and circulation necessarily transform the ideas and concepts in question: social change involves both shifts in “common sense” and transformations of the epistemic resources that drive those shifts.

As our colleagues argue, the costs of this are not equally borne. Given this, Edusei asks the right question: does the theory of liberatory social change we lay out work if the oppressed refuse to participate? The simple answer is: No. The privileged aren’t going to chart pathways to liberatory social change on their own. This is not a normative position, but a sociological one that we take as a challenging starting point for theorizing social change. As noted above, recent research bears this out. Disasters open a window of potential opportunity, which can be turned to authoritarianism or equity. What conditions generate democratic, equitable political change? Essentially, when marginalized movements – or “civil society groups” (as Politkina et al. name them) – seize the greater freedom of expression opportunity presented by disasters and demand it.

It is not fair that the leadership of those who are most oppressed is often required to ease oppression for everyone. We make no claims that the more privileged are entitled to this leadership. Questions about the ethics of uptake can often operate to center the agency and responsibilities of more privileged members of broader coalitions, but the relatively privileged are unlikely to be the protagonists of coalitional and democratic resistance. Our colleagues are right that further harms always accrue to those who offer this kind of guidance, and that this is a serious ethical concern.

It is for this reason that we spend so long with Octavia Butler’s (Butler, Reference Butler2006) Parable of the Talents, which maps this terrain while refusing to offer any comfort. From the promise of the autonomous community of “Earthseed” at the end of the better-known Parable of the Sower, Talents explores both the catastrophic (and intergenerational) unworlding that occurs when such a community is violently dismantled, and the forms of abandonment, betrayal, and refraction that follow popular and privileged uptake of radical ideas. In the end, Earthseed succeeds: it sends a rocket to seek alternate worlds, as Olamina had envisioned. But the rocket is called “Christopher Columbus”; the symbolic valence of the mission, as well as its practical project, reflect the values of the elites who have funded it, not the Earthseed cultivated by Olamina. Butler’s ambivalence suggests, as all three of our colleagues argue, that marginalized communities have good reason to protect their epistemic ingenuity, to refuse to share epistemic resources with the more privileged, to refuse to enter into relationship with them. In the next section, we examine one example that illustrates the tensions embedded in this argument.

4. Queer Partying and Marronage

Edusei asks: what if the marginalized refuse to participate in struggles for social change? What if they refuse solidarity and protect their epistemic resources from uptake and appropriation? We explore the importance of such practices of refusal in what we call “epistemologies of marronage,” or the cultivation of communities and imaginaries that refuse and flee dominant structures and ways of knowing. We recognize such refusal as a powerful tool of survival and adaptation, which is often absolutely essential to the work of finding ways to live otherwise – and to find comfort, community, and home – in conditions in which one was “never meant to survive.” “Epistemologies of marronage” refer to ways of knowing and being that recognize and refuse what Dotson calls the “bad magic” of hegemonic systems (Berenstain et al., Reference Berenstain, Dotson, Paredes, Ruíz and Silva2021); in her scheme of epistemic oppression, these are knowers and communities who turn contributory injustice into modes of self-protection, ensuring that the epistemic resources and social practices curated in these spaces remain unintelligible – and thus unextractable – from within dominant epistemological systems.

One such example is the rebuilding of queer communities and spaces in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. In the book, we explore the ways that the scale and scope of government failure and abandonment after Maria necessitated experiments in collective survival. The vast majority of deaths in Puerto Rico after Maria were the result of failures of infrastructure based on decades of colonial under-development: electricity off for 6 months, no way to get off the mountains to find help, health centers that never re-opened, water systems crushed and un-repaired – the list is endless. This failure highlighted, as disasters often do, the broader systemic failures, named in stenciled graffiti across the island, saying “El desastre es la colonia,” or “The disaster is the colony” (Bonilla, Reference Bonilla2020).

The storm closed a tiki bar in San Juan. This may seem small in the face of the death and devastation, but as Hay points out, the need for revelatory spaces of joy and expression is critical to both survival and resistance. And this tiki bar, El Escondite (or the Hideaway) was a safe space for queer folks in a context in which they faced ongoing violence, even if gay relationships had technically been legal since 2003. It was just one of many such spaces that were destroyed in hurricanes Maria and Irma, or closed in the economic collapse which these storms spurred.

The queer communities that relied on these spaces faced not just the loss of electricity, the struggle to find food but also the loss of spaces and solidarities in which they could be comfortable as themselves. As Edusei reminds us, this too is an unworlding. “I needed someone to laugh at my jokes, to hug me, to tell me I looked beautiful,” as Roma Rodríguez, a young trans woman said (Rosa & Mazzei, Reference Rosa and Mazzei2019). Members of these communities reported suicide after suicide, although such statistics were not tracked by state authorities. As Warmack suggests, the testimonies of the dead, and their lessons in survival and refusal, have been largely erased.

Practices of survival in conditions in which one is “not meant to survive” are transformational. After Maria, queer communities focused on finding each other, and building new spaces, new worlds, in which to be themselves. Over time, across Puerto Rico, there arose a “networked geography” of these groups, which was facilitated by the absence of the state during hurricane recovery (Villanueva & LeBrón, Reference Villanueva and LeBrón2020). This absence, as Yarimar Bonilla puts it, “lifted the veil off Puerto Rico’s colonial status and ushered in new forms of self-reliance [and] also lifted (in part) the veil of constraint on queer communities. In the context of blackouts, scarcity, and social uncertainty, the logics of shame and homophobia fell more and more to the wayside.” (Bonilla, Reference Bonilla2020, 160) This illustrates another ethical challenge in the study of disaster: those who innovate transformative modes of survival often do so not because they chose to refuse other forms of solidarity or resources, but because no such resources or solidarity were on offer.Footnote ⁶ These gaps create contexts in which, performance artist Macha Colón explains, people could “explore things that they couldn’t do…and now they realize that they can do it, and who the heck is going to tell them no?…Being in that time of not having electricity and not kind of having rules and laws … it allowed for [the queer scene] to thrive because … it was sort of like we could do things without having to ask permission.” (Bonilla, Reference Bonilla2020, 160).

Colón captures the way that the combination of disaster and state failure can be both, as Edusei puts is, ontologically catastrophic for the oppressed and marginalized, as well as a site of transformative survival that shapes broader epistemic shifts. In San Juan, the queer community turned an empty lot that had been used to dump trash into a venue for parties, dancing, art markets, and drag shows. Its founder, Carla Torres, said, “people love it, because it’s not easy to find a space like this. People recognize and appreciate the space – they value it, they care for it” (Rosa & Mazzei, Reference Rosa and Mazzei2019). Such spaces operated as “differential spaces of resistance” (Villanueva & LeBrón, Reference Villanueva and LeBrón2020), in which practices like dancing, drag, and distinct queer spaces became critical modes of survival, refusal, and resistance. As Bonilla argues, there was a kind of “hopeful pessimism” in these spaces; as the trans feminist artist María José puts it, “As the apocalypse continues, why wouldn’t people be queerer?…. That sounds really nihilistic – but as professionalism, and capitalism, and the way that we know the world keeps crumbling, there’s going to be more space to be queer” (Bonilla, Reference Bonilla2020, 160).

As queer communities focused on rebuilding spaces of survival, liberation, and refusal in the wake of Maria, the twin threats of disaster capitalism and reactionary discrimination encroached. In 2018, Governor Ricardo A. Rosselló described Puerto Rico as “a blank canvas for innovation” essentially inviting Puerto Rico’s decline into predatory disaster capitalism. In June of 2019, the Puerto Rican legislature passed a “religious liberty” bill allowing businesses to refuse service to queer communities. Though Gov. Rosselló vetoed the proposed legislation, in July 2019, a leaked 889-page Telegram group chat showed the Governor and his administration engaged in homophobic mockery of the suffering of the people across Puerto Rico. This combination of disaster capitalism, legislative discrimination, and official disdain for marginalized communities are not uncommon as the heroic phases of disaster give way to deeper disillusionment, and they can compound and institutionalize the hardships experienced by those communities. But they can also open opportunities for broader coalitions of resistance.

In this moment, Puerto Rico’s queer community took to the streets, leading two sustained weeks of protest which called for the governor’s resignation with Black feminists, drag queens, and other members of the queer community front and center. The protests marked a turn toward another kind of refusal: a recognition that broader coalitions are sometimes necessary to protect the worlds one has built. In this shift, practices of refusal became symbols of resistance: the protests were framed as parties. Ricky Martin waved a giant rainbow flag; Bad Bunny coined the name for the protesters “a generación del Yo no me dejo (i.e., “the nonsubmissive generation”). The protests culminated in a “twerkathon” (Gonzalez, Reference Gonzalez2023) – known as perreo combativo – in front of the cathedral of Old San Juan just before the governor’s resignation; in the weeks after, perreo combative parties spread to New York, Miami, and Los Angeles in solidarity. This “combative queerness” was, as Bonilla argues, “a noted departure from the traditional “scripts” of Puerto Rican nationalism that have long excluded black and queer political subjects” (Bonilla, Reference Bonilla2020, 160).

The Puerto Rican Summer protests bear out Hay’s description of the ways that dancing, drag, and distinctively queer spaces are sites of instituting imaginaries that both create alternate possibilities for living – and being at home – otherwise, and open up new lines of critique (Code, Reference Code2006; Ray, Reference Ray2025). Queer partying was, first, a casualty of the disaster, shaping catastrophic unworlding. It was then a site of survival and refusal, as queer communities focused on building their own spaces of survival and transformation in the cracks and failures of state response. That it then became a tool of broader resistance reflects the ways that, as the rebuilding of the state hardened and expanded oppressive and exclusionary norms, other forms of refusal became necessary.

The long tail of disaster creates conditions in which oppressive forces gathered, and members of the queer community actively led and shaped a broader resistance, recognizing that building a broader coalition ensured the survival of the communities cultivated since the storm. Some of the community leaders who turned to protest in 2019 described having the sense that they were being told that if they wanted to seek a better future, they would have to go elsewhere – to abandon the worlds they had built. The protests were, as Bonilla puts it, a way to “redefine what it means to stay home and engage in political action for a better future” (Bonilla, Reference Bonilla2020, 159). In the book, we explore how epistemologies of marronage can be critical to “making home” in hostile and disastrous conditions. The Puerto Rican summer protests suggest another mode of “making home”: they were an assertion of the “hereness” (Klein & Taylor, Reference Klein and Taylor2025) of these communities, a “hereness” made legible in part through leadership in a broader coalition. By repurposing queer practices of survival like dance, drag, and partying into powerful tools for transformative public protest, and building bridges with a broader movement, queer activists enacted a refusal to be erased or displaced.

Our colleagues are right to point to the unfairness of this, the burden that it places on queer and marginalized communities to share their epistemic ingenuity and lead movements for broader justice, and the harms that publicity and appropriation produce. As Hay argues, these harms are not equally borne: more privileged queers benefit from the mainstreaming and visibility of queer culture, while more vulnerable others are actively harmed by the patterns of extraction, appropriation, and infiltration that follow. The schisms within these communities, between those who choose public protest and those who prioritize collective practices of refusal, are another dimension of this harm. Given the nature of these harms, it is especially important for oppressed and marginalized communities to make political homes, to cultivate spaces of comfort, play, and liberation – spaces one can “sink into” (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2013). As the cultivation of queer spaces after Maria illustrates, disasters can both necessitate and facilitate this kind of epistemic marronage.

5. Conclusion: Against Neutrality

As we noted at the beginning, disaster policy and response are what Adrienne Maree Brown calls “imagination battles” (Brown, Reference Brown2017). The stakes are high, as conceptual imaginaries beget policy ideas which beget practical action. Ideas have, in these fast-moving settings, life and death implications, and policies enacted during disaster often have long-standing institutional impacts.

Critics on the disaster practitioner side have called our book too political, arguing that emergency management and public health, to succeed, must be politically neutral. But neutrality, as many of the case studies in our book demonstrate, has always been a fiction. As we show in our account of the 1927 Mississippi flood, the Red Cross articulated a federal disaster policy aimed at apolitical “neutrality” against calls from the Black community to use federal disaster aid to support greater economic justice in the sharecropping economy. As a result, aid went disproportionately to white landowners, with enforcement focused on preventing Black workers from leaving their economic bondages. “Neutrality,” as always, ended up putting its thumb on the scale to strengthen existing systems of injustice. Naomi Klein’s famous analysis of how disasters are exploited for capitalist and authoritarian gains via the “shock doctrine” illustrates the ways that disasters can be used to entrench existing systems of power at speed (Klein, Reference Klein2007).

Calls for “neutrality” are also at the heart of the current turn away from the lessons of social epistemology in disaster practice and government policy. While our colleagues are right to emphasize the dangers of standpoint epistemology, it’s worth remembering that a theory that does not value the participation of the oppressed and marginalized in shaping social change is not better. We see this in the approach of the current administration, which is actively erasing the contributions of the marginalized from all domains of knowledge production within their purview, and building policies that dismantle and block tools designed to recognize when oppressed communities are being actively harmed. Epistemic injustice and oppression in disasters and public health are hardening – and this harms both the communities being silenced and our collective understanding of the threats we face together.

In disaster contexts, the fiction of neutrality masks a dominant disaster imaginary that is primed to instill fear and the sense that one is always under threat. This is a way to jumpstart other imaginaries based on that fear – the desire for protective strongmen, the demonization of non-native communities, and so forth. Partly for this reason, white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have long recognized what we call disaster natality and its potential for radicalization: in the wake of rupture, people are seeking both community and the epistemic resources to make sense of that rupture, and they are thus epistemically susceptible to radical ideas and conspiracy theories. This is wedded to a long history of treating the specter of disaster as a justification for “prepper culture,” which has roots in white nationalist spaces. White nationalist groups – ever opportunistic, as Kathleen Belew has argued (Belew, Reference Belew2018) – have a robust disaster imaginary, rooted, as we argue, in the American frontier story of the state of nature. After Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, white militias shot Black New Orleanians fleeing the flooded city in the name of protecting their property. In Florida and North Carolina, white militias arm and train disaster survivors for the next storm, providing resources, solace, and weapons training, priming them to understand themselves as abandoned by government response, and to anticipate disaster as a site of savage and racialized violence in which “normal” civil laws and ethical rules will be suspended.

This disaster imaginary primes survivors to become agents for broader forms of violence. A direct line can be traced from the fear-based imaginaries charged through the Covid-19 pandemic to the political assaults of January 6^th, 2021. As Luke Mogelson (Reference Mogelson2022) documents in his book The Storm Is Here, and as we argue in our Chapter 8, this blueprint can be found in the takeover of the Michigan state capitol in April 2020 in protest of Covid shutdowns; some of the same people, the same militias, protested against Covid lockdowns, and then against the Movement for Black Lives, and then against the legitimacy of the 2020 election. This imaginary has proved remarkably resilient: distrust of public health and government institutions is, in 2025, fueling public support for DOGE and the Trump administration’s dismantling of federal agencies, chief amongst them FEMA and the Department of Health. As we write, conspiracy theories about the rapidly researched Covid-19 vaccine have become skepticism about all vaccines – and a federal agency explicitly aiming to dismantle access to vaccines both at home and abroad.

Our book posits that it did not have to be this way. That there are other ways of practicing disaster, of building policy that supports liberatory pathways of social change, rather than surging the reactionary ones. This is not a new idea – it was at the heart of the Black community’s vision for the first federal disaster response to the 1927 flood of the Mississippi. But it is, we argue, an idea worth examining and elaborating in an era increasingly characterized by ongoing disaster.

Of course, the challenge is how to make sure that our revised framework is actually liberatory, and not a more insidious form of exploitation. We acknowledge that the points that our critics make are correct: working with more privileged survivors will harm marginalized knowers. Their ideas will be co-opted, and their stories and practices appropriated and infiltrated. They will be misunderstood, disregarded. In light of this, they may birth liberatory spaces for themselves alone, creating communities of marronage outside the boundaries of more dominant imaginaries. Many of these liberatory spaces will be trampled by official recovery processes and public backlash or dismantled through disaster capitalism and displacement. Even refusal is no guarantee of survival.

It is difficult to theorize disaster in a hopeful key. Our project is normative: we choose a side in the imagination battles to come. It is our contention that the only way to escape our current dystopia is crisis by crisis, where in each crisis we all struggle to connect enough to build a movement strong enough to topple the regimes of oppression we face. For Scheidel, Povitkina and von Bavel, historically, the only time that this liberation can realistically be triggered is during the chaos of disaster. Building on the insights of social epistemology, we argue that it can only be sparked by knowledge from the margins.

This is a cruel burden; there is also a kind of power in it that Butler understood. On her gravestone, unburned with the Eaton fire raging on all around, is carved Olamina’s litany from Parable of the Sower, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change” (Butler, Reference Butler1996). The work of shaping change is recognizing that change will always come – that disasters will radicalize us, whether we want them to or not. Choosing how they radicalize us is an epistemic project: it means harnessing the epistemic opportunities of disaster by turning toward the liberatory visions crafted outside dominant imaginaries – rather than being taken in by reactionary distrust or hiding behind the mantle of neutrality.

The burdens of this choice are not, as our critics argue, equally distributed. But this is not to say that the epistemic and ethical burdens of this choice do not confront each of us. At the end of her Hugo essay, Audre Lorde (Reference Lorde1990) issues a challenge: “Each one of us has some power that can be used, somewhere, somehow, to help save our earth.” In Puerto Rico, queer activists turned dancing into, first, a practice of refusal and then, into a call for regime change. In Altadena, Nikki High turned her bookstore into a place to amplify and knit together radical emergent community practices. These acts placed unnecessary burdens on these figures, who could have refused such leadership. But they also birthed creative spaces for important change – or at least its possibility. We cannot say whether they should have acted this way or that – they are the protagonists here, not us – we can only say that the risks they took were meaningful, and that our work shows that risks such as theirs do create more equality after disaster. Which – as Scheidel and others argue – may be the only way to create more equality at all.