Jordan Pascoe is professor of philosophy at Manhattan College. She is a feminist philosopher who works in moral, social, and political philosophy, feminist epistemology, Kantian philosophy, and philosophy of race. She writes about sex, disasters, domestic and caregiving labor, and intersectionality. Her first book is Kant’s Theory of Labour. Mitch Stripling is the director of the New York City Pandemic Response Institute (PRI). PRI is operated by Columbia University with key partner the City University of New York School of Public Health and Health Policy. He has a long history of leadership roles in emergency management, disaster response and planning, coordination, and response to public health crises, including as national director for Emergency Preparedness and Response at Planned Parenthood (PPFA), and as an assistant commissioner at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH). Prior to his roles in New York City, Stripling coordinated disaster responses for the Florida Department of Health. He has helped plan and implement the responses to more than twenty federally declared disasters and public health emergencies.

In this timely book, Jordan Pascoe and Mitch Stripling offer interdisciplinary work at its finest by deftly weaving multiple perspectives together to reveal how existing emergency management systems reinforce structural injustice. Their original framework helps us not only understand the epistemological forces that sustain the destructive power of disasters but also see the spark of social and political transformation disasters contain. The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change is a must-read for anyone interested in more caring, equitable, and just ways of facing the inevitable crises to come.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPART I: UNDERSTANDING DISASTERSChapter 1: So Much Water, So Little Time: Disaster Natality and How We Destroy ItChapter 2: Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Imagining Disaster in Philosophy, Pop Culture, and Preparedness Chapter 3: What We Don’t Know Will Kill Us: Pandemic Caregiving and Parasitic ResiliencePART II: DISASTERS, SOLIDARITIES, AND SOCIAL CHANGEChapter 4: The Epistemological Watershed and Who It’s Designed to ServeChapter 5: From Warning to Heroics: How Solidarity FormsChapter 6: From the Honeymoon to Disillusionment: The Sources of Collective CreativityChapter 7: Disaster Solidarities and Pandemic ProtestChapter 8: Disaster Backlash: Reactionary Movements and Pandemic SolidarityPART III: DISASTERS, OTHERWISEChapter 9: Imagining Disaster, Otherwise: Science Fiction, Marronage, and the Abolition Imaginaries of the COVID-19 PandemicChapter 10: Into the Paravi: Reimagining Disaster PracticeNotesBibliographyIndexAbout the Authors