Wicked Stars:
A Zin to Trouble Disaster Studies
why are the stars wicked and what should we do about it?
The stars of the ancient Greeks were wicked. And so are our contemporary studies of what we call disaster. At least, this is what our collective of scholars who published and who have been supporting the Disaster Studies Manifesto: Power, Prestige and Forgotten Values believes. We think that it is time to revisit the alignment of the stars, and we offer this bulletin, provocatively titled Wicked Stars, as a step forward.
Wicked Stars offers an alternative space to researchers and whoever else feels like they need to share about their experience of harm, hardship and suffering as per the ethos of the Disaster Studies Manifesto and Accord. We conceive of Wicked Stars as a heterodox space that invites challenges to dominant and critical approaches to studying disasters and the work of disaster risk reduction, response, and recovery. This is a space in which to lodge critiques from multiple trajectories, for renderings of humans and other beings ill matched to prevailing orthodoxies; to identify and aspire to new possibilities of repair and transformation; to reject state legibilities or to refashion them; in sum, Wicked Stars do not merely portend catastrophe, they flicker in varying degrees of intensity on new pathways to the otherwise.
Issue 1 - 2025
Editorial: why are the stars wicked and what should we do about it? by JC Gaillard, Ksenia Chmutina and A.J. Faas
Accord!: the disaster risk reduction studies accord song by barefoot bob
GRRIPP - Through the (de)colonial looking glass: reflections on a feminist project by Maureen Fordham
Mula sa pagmamahal hanggang sa poot, mula sa pag-aalaga hanggang sa disaster disk deduction sa Indung Kapampangan by JC Gaillard
Kill your ancestors, choose new elders by Omer Aijazi
La dependencia en la gestión de centros de operaciones de emergencias y desastres en Ecuador by Freddy Yandún
Tides beyond binaries by Aditi Sharan
Cap-Haïtien’s struggle against flooding and environmental crises by Crystal Felima
Book review - Aijazi O. (2024) Atmospheric violence: disaster and repair in Kashmir. University of Pennsylvania Press. by Rubina Jasani
The spatial politics of hazard warnings signs: an incomplete photo comparison of two countries by Ricardo Fuentealba
In quell’aprile di un giorno by Isabella Tomassi
Our editorial collective
Jake Rom D. Cadag, University of the Philippines, Philippines
Kaira Zoe Alburo-Cañete, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Ksenia Chmutina, Loughborough University, United Kingdom
A.J. Faas, San José State University, United States of America
Ricardo Fuentealba, Universidad de O’Higgins, Chile
JC Gaillard, Waipapa Taumata Rau, Aotearoa
Christopher Gomez, Kobe University, Japan
Sizwile Khoza, Stockholm Environment Institute - Asia Centre, Thailand
Aditi Sharan, Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau, Aotearoa
How to submit
Wicked Stars is open to all voices, in all forms. We are committed to publishing academic essays alongside other forms of reflections, whether through visual arts and poetry, photography and songs, reviews of books and films, or any other format. We also offer a dump where we invite researchers to publish the bits and pieces that they had to cut out of their published articles because reviewers or editors thought they were irrelevant. We are open to all languages, whether spoken by hundreds of millions of people or only a few thousands. We prefer shorter pieces but we are open to submissions of any length and format. Submission must be in any conventional word processor (although .doc/.docx is preferred) and/or image (although .png is preferred) formats and must be addressed to JC Gaillard: jc.gaillard@auckland.ac.nz. The editorial collective makes acceptance decisions guided by Wicked Stars’s mission, and collective members will provide editorial guidance on accepted drafts.