"This book reflects the efforts of a group of scholars to consider a new generation of research on disasters and to chart a course for future study. They find common cause under the banner of "critical disaster studies," even as their individual research agendas span at least seven disciplines and four continents. Existing research often assumes the category of disaster as an objective given and aspires to a technical analysis of achievements and failures-while treating political and historical context as, at best, just another variable in the matrix. The authors in this book do the opposite. They do not take disasters, as a thing in themselves, for granted. They find context essential. Therefore, although they often seek to understand one particular event, they do so by widening the frame to perceive the social surround"--