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In the context of pre- and post-catastrophe education, ethnography can be an important tool to interpret the numerous pedagogical viewpoints that permeate these learning settings. The papers shows how, in times of catastrophe, the tensions that emerge between different forms of situated knowledge and practices are at the root of many of the failures of disaster education. In order to reduce the impact of disasters through capacity building, both local and global experts are involved in a common effort to interpret, shape and represent "the" disaster. In this way the catastrophe becomes a cognitive artifact that activates hypertrophic efforts of interpretation, generating multiple contradictory versions of the event itself. A single disaster fragments into conflicting sets of interpretations according to the experiences of those affected and those who intervened. Meanwhile, disasters force both researchers and practitioners alike to confront the many and shifting faces of these social imagined realities. The ethnographer is no exception. By repositioning the disaster into its diachronic dimensions, retracing the play of refractions between the different sources of knowledge on the catastrophe, and participating actively in the learning laboratories that shape the emergency arena, the ethnographer contributes towards making the disaster "real".

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-9282-0_26

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