Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Interviewees
1. Introduction
2. Backdrop: Mainstream Disaster Studies
3. Critical Approaches: Precarity, Securitisation and Disaster
Capitalism
4. Towards an Anarchist Approach to Disaster
5. Occupy Sandy Mutual Aid, New York, 2012
6. Covid-19 Mutual Aid, London, 2020
7. Conclusion
Notes
Index
Rhiannon Firth is currently a lecturer in Sociology at UCL. She is the author of two books: Utopian Politics: Citizenship and Practice and Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the UK. She is active in social movements and popular education projects in London.
'Supremely accomplished. A major step forward in the theory of
anarchist practice and deserves our urgent attention as the
collapse of capitalism unfolds'
*Uri Gordon, author of 'Anarchy Alive!'*
'Commendable - a book that prepares us to think about and react to
the kinds of system failures, collapses, and other disasters that
will become increasingly more common over the next decades. Firth
complicates the important concept of mutual aid, examining the
danger of neoliberal recuperation while emphasising the subversive
possibilities at its heart’
*Peter Gelderloos, activist and author of 'The Solutions Are
Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution From Below'*
‘A clear, timely and rigorous account of anarchist responses to
catastrophes. It avoids romanticisation, as Rhiannon Firth
incisively unpicks state and corporate strategies of co-option’
*Benjamin Franks, Senior Lecturer in Social and Political
Philosophy, University of Glasgow*
'Disrupts disaster studies using an anarchist epistemology to
question widely held assumptions about the state, businesses and
social capital in recovery. Firth finds anarchist practices
underlie everyday actions in disasters. This ground-breaking book
shows how imagination, radical pedagogy, and social movements are
living components of disaster anarchy'
*John Preston, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex*
'Unpacking the beautiful possibilities of mutual aid, Firth reveals
a glimmer of hope in this era of darkness and dismay. Anarchy is
affirmed as the dawn light of our collective capacity to transform
disaster into grace as we create a new day beyond the failings of
capitalism and the state.'
*Simon Springer, Professor of Human Geography at the University of
Newcastle, Australia*
''Disaster Anarchy' makes an exceptional contribution to the
existing literature. Highly original and beautifully written, it is
a must read for any activist or scholar interested in exploring
utopian alternatives to the status quo, and creating a new society
in the shell of the old.'
*Richard J. White, Reader in Human Geography, Sheffield Hallam
University, Britain*
‘Firth bridges the theories and methodologies in the continuing
development of anarchist and liberatory frameworks of decentralised
disaster responses, first articulated after Hurricane Katrina. They
demonstrate through personal histories and analysis deeper paths
forward in anarchist processes and practices that allow our
liberatory imaginations to resist the collapse while creating
viable alternatives without state coercion or interference'
*scott crow, author of 'Black Flags and Windmills: Hope , Anarchy
and the Common Ground Collective'*
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