Unearthing the Genesis of Academic Knowledge and Disaster Risk Reduction
Christopher Gomez
https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197851487.003.0625
Structures governing academic knowledge are arguably incompatible with the genuine needs of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and the development of community and bottom-up knowledge and knowledge structure.
Early-21st-century universities can trace their origin back to the medieval Christian institutions to which they owe their organizational logic. The hierarchical, dogmatic machine oriented toward a single Truth to become the authoritative truth is an inheritance from the Catholic Church and has drifted into modern and contemporary scientific structures, and even in the 21st century these structures have never truly been abandoned. Although the object of interest shifted from God to Nature, the underlying architecture leading to the desired knowledge has remained the same.
This inherited structure and machine of knowledge construction resists change thanks to normal science, defined by T. Kuhn as academic research that actively resists paradigm-shifting ideas and that functions like a religious practice that weaves a network of evidence within a dogma or within a preset set of paradigms. Arguably, normal science is not attempting to reach the objective. It aims at comforting the pathway toward this objective. Consequently, DRR was never meant to be truly solved, especially because solving the problem would dismantle the set of knowledge striations that allowed for the control of the space of knowledge. Indeed, the institutions studying DRR issues need to justify their existences and the funding they receive.
This inherited system of getting close to God but never to reach is further entrenched through the interrelation between political and economic power and the control of knowledge. As kings and the church entertained a fused yet conflicting relationship, so do neoliberalism and capitalism, in ways that this relation creates a self-reinforcing pyramid of academic, political, and economic control. In this way, universities, like the church before, serve the interests of those at the top of this hierarchy rather than the communities they claim to help. In DRR scholarship, this notably manifests as competing disciplines each claiming supremacy but systematically excluding Indigenous knowledge, often through a diffracting lens of academic language and research. This has led academics to study disasters rather than meaningfully address them.
This pyramid is further extended to another layer of vulnerable individuals in the Global South waiting to be helped by Western academics, in the same way that the Indigenous populations were waiting for the white men to colonize them and civilize them. The individuals who imagined the inequalities and who perpetrate them are the same ones who put on the mantle of the hero to go and save the Indigenous population, as we are all, and we must all converge toward one goal, toward the top of the pyramid.
