Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster – serie

Japan is a place where powerful earthquakes have occurred more frequently and have caused more harm in the modern era than they have in all but a handful of other locations on the planet. In the twentieth century alone, earthquake disasters in Japan took almost as many lives as they had in all of the country’s recorded history up to that point. Predicting Disasters is the first English-language book to explore how scientists convinced policy makers and the public in postwar Japan that catastrophic earthquakes were coming, and the first to show why earthquake prediction has played such a central role in Japan’s efforts to prepare for a dangerous future ever since.Kerry Smith shows how, in the twentieth century, scientists struggled to make large-scale earthquake disasters legible to the public and to policy makers as significant threats to Japan’s future and as phenomena that could be anticipated and prepared for. Smith also explains why understanding those struggles matters. Disasters, Smith contends, belong alongside more familiar topics of analysis in modern Japanese history—such as economic growth and its impacts, political crises and popular protest, and even the legacies of the war—for the work they do in helping us better understand how the past has influenced beliefs about Japan’s possible futures, and how beliefs about the future shape the present.Predicting Disasters makes relevant elements of Japan’s past more accessible to readers interested in the histories of disaster and scientific communities, as well as to those who want to gain a better understanding of the risk and uncertainty surrounding natural phenomena.

Explores the ever-present experiences of risk that characterized the daily existence of individuals, communities, and societies in the late Roman worldLiving with Risk in the Late Roman World explores the ever-present experiences of risk that characterized the daily existence of individuals, communities, and societies in the late Roman world (late third century CE through mid-sixth century CE). Recognizing the vital role of human agency, author Cam Grey bases his argument on the concept of the riskscape: the collection of risks that constitute everyday lived experience, the human perception of those risks, and the actions that exploit, mitigate, or exacerbate them. In contrast to recent grand narratives of the fate of the late Roman Empire, Living with Risk in the Late Roman World focuses on the quotidian practices of mitigation and management, foreknowledge and prediction, and mobilization and manipulation of risks at the individual and community levels.Grey illustrates the ubiquity of these practices through a collection of anecdotes that emphasize the highly localized, heterogeneous, and complementary nature of riskscapes: members of local communities enlisting figures of power to neutralize the hazards posed by imminent catastrophes, be it a tsunami, earthquake, or volcanic eruption; Christian holy figures both suffering and imposing bodily affliction as part of their claims to control such hazards and thereby to exercise influence in these communities; intimate experiences of seasonality and weather that shaped local practices of subsistence but also of self-representation; and geographically specific and fiercely contested claims to special knowledge and control of water.Multidisciplinary in its methodology and provocative in its argumentation, Living with Risk in the Late Roman World demonstrates that human communities in the ancient past were inextricably intertwined with the world around them, and that the actions they took simultaneously responded to and shaped the risks—both hazardous and favorable—that they perceived.