The Ontology of Disaster

In this chapter, Cary engages in dialogue with disaster and resilience researcher Marion Benkaiouche. Together, they discuss lessons learnt from Benkaiouche’s own experience responding to forest fires and water scarcity in the province of British Columbia, as well as past research and ethnography into disaster. We contextualize our dialogue as part of a broader cross-disciplinary inquiry into disaster studies and what we call “disaster-response pedagogy”, increasingly weighing upon educational realities and connected to the ongoing poly/meta-crisis discussion. Benkaiouche proposes a tripartite ontological continuum relevant to the work of educating and being a community leader in a time of unravelling by articulating the relationships between the ontology of disaster, the ontology of crisis, and the ontology of the accident.