S10E5 - Black Power, Black Scholarship, and Disaster Justice

About this episode

This episode explores the intersection of Black scholarship and disaster studies, emphasizing community engagement and resistance.

Episode overviewEpisode 5 centers Black power and Black scholarship as foundational to understanding disasters, vulnerability, resistance, and justice. Through a wide-ranging conversation grounded in lived experience, political struggle, and long-term community engagement, the episode examines how Black intellectual traditions reshape how disasters are understood, studied, and responded to. Hosts Jason von Meding Ksenia Chmutina Guests Danielle Rivera — Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley; scholar of environmental and climate justice working with rural and unincorporated marginalized communities Dewald van Niekerk — Professor at North-West University (South Africa); founder and editor-in-chief of Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies; leading scholar of disaster risk in Southern Africa Key themes Black scholarship as central—not peripheral—to disaster studies Structural racism, historicity, and the “disaster before the disaster” Community resistance, agency, and epistemologies of survival Ubuntu, mutual support, and collective responsibility Rejecting colorblind and event-focused disaster narratives Long-term engagement versus…

People in this episode

Hosts: Jason von Meding, Ksenia Chmutina

Guests: Danielle Rivera, Dewald van Niekerk

Topics covered

• Black power
• Black scholarship
• disaster justice
• vulnerability
• community engagement
• structural racism
• epistemologies of survival

Keywords

• environmental justice
• climate justice
• community resistance
• Ubuntu
• collective responsibility

Mentioned in this episode

Places: South Africa, Southern Africa, the Mississippi Delta

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• S10E6 - Latin America, the Caribbean, and Plural Worlds of Disaster Thinking · December 31, 2025 · 43 min
• S10E4 - Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Disaster Politics · December 28, 2025 · 39 min
• S10E3 - Urbanism, Technology, Space, and the Invention of Catastrophe · December 28, 2025 · 50 min
• S10E2 - Feminism, Listening, and Disaster Justice · December 27, 2025 · 43 min