A J Faas
Biographic Data
| ID | 5413 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A J Faas |
| GIVEN NAMES | A J |
| FAMILY NAME | Faas |
| SIGNATURE | FAAS A J |
| AFFILIATIONS | San Jose State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8758-5624 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 106 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Anthropology is not broken. It is doing its job
I respond to the Vanderbilt–Washington University “State of Scholarship” report’s claim that anthropology exemplifies scholarly decline by arguing that the report mistakes ethical and public commitments for a retreat from rigor. The essay explains why attention to inequality is not ideological capture, but reflective of a long-standing commitment to testing common sense against evidence. I make a case for the humanities and social sciences as pub…
La vulnérabilité est une question: Quatre Esquisses Et Trois Invitations À La Rendre Très Sérieusement Étrange
La vulnérabilité est un concept développé pour théoriser et orienter les recherches sur la manière dont les catastrophes sont produites par des relations, des structures et des processus sociaux qui ne sont en aucun cas inévitables et qui influencent la répartition inégale des impacts des dangers et des opérations humanitaires à plusieurs niveaux sociaux et spatio-temporels. Dans ce chapitre, j’esquisse plusieurs tendances dans la réflexion sur l…
Es la vulnerabilidad un concepto anticuado? Después de las materias y el espacio
Las teorías de la vulnerabilidad han constituido el núcleo conceptual de la antropología de los desastres durante aproximadamente 40 años. Sin embargo, existe un trasfondo de inquietud entre los expertos en desastres y los líderes comunitarios, que temen que el uso vernáculo de la vulnerabilidad pueda resultar insultante para las personas y comunidades con las que trabajamos y con las que nos identificamos. Existe una creciente incomodidad con la…
Japanese incarceration memorial as trauma portfolio play
In collaboration with the Japanese American Museum of San José, California, we examined their exhibit of WWII-era incarceration of Japanese Americans to understand how the presentation of different positionalities (e.g., Japanese/American, loyal/disloyal) engage with and contest the terms of incarceration and internal politics within the Japanese American community. In our analysis, we focus on the reproduction and contestation of particular narr…
Applied Anthropology Meets the Moment in the Doing
Projects for queering disaster: Reciprocal knowledge exchange and practice
Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify LGBTQ+ perceptions of and experiences with hazards, vulnerabilities and disasters in the San Francisco Bay Area in the USA and to co-develop applied projects to “queer” disaster knowledge production and risk reduction activities in the region. Design/methodology/approach This is a community science project in which we collaborate with community members to enhance both community and scientific knowl…
State aesthetics and the Other-Nature in disaster memorials
I examine the aesthetic (re)production of the state in disaster museums and memorials in a comparative analysis of the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial in Beichuan, China, and the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. I explore how particular national imaginaries and narratives of the past were projected to produce narratives that cloak the chaos of catastrophe and channel powerful public emotions into a robust state imaginary operating heroi…
In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador
In the Shadow of Tungurahua relates the stories of the people of Penipe, Ecuador living in and between several villages around the volcano Tungurahua and two resettlement communities built for people displaced by government operations following volcanic eruptions in 1999 and 2006. The stories take shape in ways that influence prevailing ideas about how disasters are produced and reproduced, in this case by shifting assemblages of the state first …
Aging queer in a pandemic: Intersectionalities and perceptions
Purpose The purpose of this study is to highlight the experiences and issues of an overlooked demographic: older LGBTQ + adults in the US, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This allows the authors to explore possible changes in policy and practice regarding the management of the pandemic with attention to elderly LGBTQ. Design/methodology/approach Building on the authors’ experience in disaster research and a study of older LGBTQ + adults …
Japantown Prepared And Organizational Studies: Campus-Community Partnerships For Disaster Preparedness
Universities and community-based organizations partner to provide benefits to students and to communities where universities are situated. We examine the core elements of a successful partnership in a case study of an ongoing collaboration between San José State University (SJSU) and Japantown Prepared, a community-based organization whose mission is to advance disaster preparedness at the household and community level within San José, California…
Building Community-Level Disaster Preparedness Through Small Business Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Marketing
Japantown Prepared, a community-based disaster preparedness organization in San José, California’s historic Japantown, began a long-term partnership with the Department of Anthropology and the Organizational Studies Program at San José State University in 2016. This article is a study of one of their many collaborative projects, a disaster preparedness Business Certification Project meant to foster the development of disaster preparedness in the …
De La Investigación Aplicada a la Acción Participativa, Parte II: Y Ahora, ¿que? Diálogos Comunitarios y Redescubriendo Nuestras Comunidades
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation A.J. Faas, María del Rosario Marcelo Brito; De La Investigación Aplicada a la Acción Participativa, Parte II: Y Ahora, ¿que? Diálogos Comunitarios y Redescubriendo Nuestras Comunidades. Practicing Anthropology 1 March 2021; 43 (2): 28–33. doi: https:…
From Applied Research to Participatory Action, Part II: Y Ahora, ¿que? Community Dialogues and Rediscovering Our Communities
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation A.J. Faas, María del Rosario Marcelo Brito; From Applied Research to Participatory Action, Part II: Y Ahora, ¿que? Community Dialogues and Rediscovering Our Communities. Practicing Anthropology 1 March 2021; 43 (2): 34–38. doi: https://doi.org/10.177…
This Must be the Place: Partnerships for Disaster Preparedness in San JosÉ’s Historic Japantown
Because upheavals, oppression, and disaster feature so prominently in the history and (re) making of Japantown San José, preparedness and recovery are in many ways structuring idioms of Japantown and its translocal networks. Memories of generational traumas and recoveries are passed through generations and across cultures in Japantown, as key processes in its history are memorialized in monuments, museums, artwork, plaques, benches, and everyday …
From Applied Research to Participatory Action, Part I: Beyond the “Bucket Theory” of Community-Based Leadership
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation A.J. Faas, Chelsea Halliwell, Ailea Merriam-Pigg, DeDe Patterson, Jamieson Mockel; From Applied Research to Participatory Action, Part I: Beyond the “Bucket Theory” of Community-Based Leadership. Practicing Anthropology 1 March 2021; 43 (2): 4–9. doi…
De la Investigación Aplicada a la Acción Participativa, Parte I: Más Allá de la “teoría del Balde” del Liderazgo Comunitario
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation A.J. Faas, Chelsea Halliwell, Ailea Merriam-Pigg, DeDe Patterson, Jamieson Mockel; De la Investigación Aplicada a la Acción Participativa, Parte I : Más Allá de la “teorÍa del Balde” del Liderazgo Comunitario. Practicing Anthropology 1 March 2021; 43…
Entangled Roots and Otherwise Possibilities: An Anthropology of Disasters Covid-19 Research Agenda
We develop questions for a COVID-19 research agenda from the anthropology of disasters to study the production of pandemic as a feature of the normatively accepted societal state of affairs. We encourage an applied study of the pandemic that recognizes it as the product of connections between people, with their social systems, nonhumans, and the material world more broadly, with attention to root causes, (post)colonialism and capitalism, multispe…
Mythopolitics of “community”: An unstable but necessary category
Purpose The authors engage a set of critical discussions on key concepts in disaster studies with attention to recent critiques of the concept “community,” which decry the term's imprecision and problematic insinuation of consensus. The authors’ objective is to explore for enduring and redeeming merit in the use of the term in disaster prevention, response and recovery and in collaborative social science research more broadly. Design/methodology/…
Is Vulnerability an Outdated Concept? After Subjects and Spaces
Theories of vulnerability have constituted the conceptual core of the anthropology of disaster for roughly 40 years. Yet, there is an undercurrent of disquiet among disaster scholars and community leaders who worry that vernacular uses of vulnerability can be insulting to individuals and communities with whom we work, and/or with whom we identify. There is a growing discomfort that categorizing the "vulnerable" acts to discursively nullify the ev…
Disaster and Climate Change-Related Displacements and Resettlements
This chapter focuses on displacement and resettlement associated principally with disasters and climate change. The aforementioned processes constitute imminent risks and human rights crises, and in the case of climate change these are most pronounced for coastal peoples around the globe. The novelty lies in the invocation of climate change to legitimize resettlement. Resettlements are politically charged environments involving complex negotiatio…
Petit capitalisms in disaster, or the limits of neoliberal imagination: Displacement, recovery, and opportunism in highland Ecuador
Disaster capitalism is typically defined as a systematic and opportunistic reconfiguration of economies and economic regulations in service of capitalist interests under the cover of environmental crisis. This article offers another complementary variety of disaster capitalism—the production of capitalist subjects, petit capitalists “empowered” by the state and nongovernmental organizations via initiation into the special knowledge and crafts of …
Social production of disasters and disaster social constructs: An exercise in disambiguation and reframing
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine whether it is useful to tease apart the intimately related propositions of social production and social construction to guide thinking in the multidisciplinary study of disasters. Design/methodology/approach The authors address our question by reviewing literature on disasters in the social sciences to disambiguate the concepts of social production and social construction. Findings The authors hav…
What Can We Learn from Practitioners' Stories
What's in Your Bag, Anthropologists
Social Network Analysis of Disaster Response, Recovery, and Adaptation
Is Vulnerability an Outdated Concept? After Subjects and Spaces
Theories of vulnerability have constituted the conceptual core of the anthropology of disaster for roughly 40 years. Yet, there is an undercurrent of disquiet among disaster scholars and community leaders who worry that vernacular uses of vulnerability can be insulting to individuals and communities with whom we work, and/or with whom we identify. There is a growing discomfort that categorizing the "vulnerable" acts to discursively nullify the ev…
Disaster vulnerability in anthropological perspective
In the study of disasters, the concept of vulnerability has been primarily employed as a cumulative indicator of the unequal distributions of certain populations in proximity to environmental and technological hazards and an individual or group ability to "anticipate, cope with, resist and recover" from disaster (Wisner et al. 2004). This concept has influenced disaster research as a means to question how natural, temporary, and random disasters …
Social production of disasters and disaster social constructs: An exercise in disambiguation and reframing
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine whether it is useful to tease apart the intimately related propositions of social production and social construction to guide thinking in the multidisciplinary study of disasters. Design/methodology/approach The authors address our question by reviewing literature on disasters in the social sciences to disambiguate the concepts of social production and social construction. Findings The authors hav…
Petit capitalisms in disaster, or the limits of neoliberal imagination: Displacement, recovery, and opportunism in highland Ecuador
Disaster capitalism is typically defined as a systematic and opportunistic reconfiguration of economies and economic regulations in service of capitalist interests under the cover of environmental crisis. This article offers another complementary variety of disaster capitalism—the production of capitalist subjects, petit capitalists “empowered” by the state and nongovernmental organizations via initiation into the special knowledge and crafts of …
Patterns of preference and practice: Bridging actors in wildfire response networks in the American Northwest
The roles of bridging actors in emergency response networks can be important to disaster response outcomes. This paper is based on an evaluation of wildfire preparedness and response networks in 21 large‐scale wildfire events in the wildland—urban interface near national forests in the American Northwest. The study investigated how key individuals in responder networks anticipated seeking out specific people in perceived bridging roles prior to t…
Reciprocity and Vernacular Statecraft: Andean Cooperation in Post-disaster Highland Ecuador
Obreros cooperativos conocidos en toda la región andina comomingas, aunque exteriormente aparecen como la misma institución cultural, se practican de manera muy diferente y con distintos significados en diferentes contextos. Este estudio analiza cómo la cooperación minga llegó a exhibir patrones contrastantes, pero íntimamente relacionados, de prácticas y relaciones sociales, tanto en un pueblo afectado y desplazado por un desastre y un reasentam…
Introduction: Twenty-First Century Dynamics of Cooperation and Reciprocity in the Andes
Postdisaster reciprocity and the development of inequality in personal networks
Within the context of major changes in economics, population distribution, and lifestyles around the world, people continue to rely on personal relationships for support. People also often create or find themselves in relationships that are alternatively asymmetrical or balanced. In this study, we are interested in how people face acute or chronic hazards and how asymmetrical or balanced exchange relationships are associated with different types …
Rain and Raids Revisited: Disaggregating Ethnic Group Livestock Raiding in the Ethiopian-Kenyan Border Region
Focusing on livestock raiding, a major form of violence in arid and semiarid regions, we evaluate the relationship between rainfall and intensity of violence, disaggregating ethnic groups that have somewhat different subsistence patterns. We do so to try to resolve previously published results and conclusions that appear contradictory – some research finding livestock violence higher in wet times suggestive of more violence in times of plenty; ot…
State aesthetics and the Other-Nature in disaster memorials
I examine the aesthetic (re)production of the state in disaster museums and memorials in a comparative analysis of the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial in Beichuan, China, and the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. I explore how particular national imaginaries and narratives of the past were projected to produce narratives that cloak the chaos of catastrophe and channel powerful public emotions into a robust state imaginary operating heroi…
Critical aspects of social networks in a resettlement setting
Each year, more than 30 million people worldwide are displaced by disaster, development, and conflict. The sheer magnitude of displacement points to a need for wider application of social science theories and methodologies to the special problems posed by these crises. We are convinced that social network analysis of the structure and development of social relations can help to identify variables and patterns essential to maintaining or fostering…
Afterward: Preparing for uncertainties
As the frequency and intensity of disasters increase around the world in the context of a changing climate, the likelihood that disasters will impact anthropological field sites increases. Therefore, disasters will increasingly become an expected component of anthropological work. In this article, the authors discuss the ways in which risk, hazards, and disasters will change anthropological research, practices, and methodologies as a whole
Continuity and change in the applied anthropology of risk, hazards, and disasters
This article introduces the special issue of The Annals of Anthropological Practice on "Continuity and Change in the Applied Anthropology of Risk, Hazards, and Disasters." After reviewing the factors that account for the heightened anthropological attention to disasters in the early 21st century, I review each of the contributions to the special issue. The topics included in the special issue represent some of the simultaneously perennial and cur…
Gendered Access to Formal and Informal Resources in Postdisaster Development in the Ecuadorian Andes
The devastating eruptions of Mount Tungurahua in the Ecuadorian highlands in 1999 and 2006 left many communities struggling to rebuild their homes and others permanently displaced to settlements built by state and nongovernmental organizations. For several years afterward, households diversified their economic strategies to compensate for losses, communities organized to promote local development, and the state and nongovernmental organizations s…
Rain and Raids Revisited: Disaggregating Ethnic Group Livestock Raiding in the Ethiopian-Kenyan Border Region
Focusing on livestock raiding, a major form of violence in arid and semiarid regions, we evaluate the relationship between rainfall and intensity of violence, disaggregating ethnic groups that have somewhat different subsistence patterns. We do so to try to resolve previously published results and conclusions that appear contradictory – some research finding livestock violence higher in wet times suggestive of more violence in times of plenty; ot…
Applied Anthropology of Risk, Hazards, and Disasters
This article provides a brief introduction to advancements in the anthropology of disasters as well as the historical antecedents and the intellectual collaborations that contributed to contemporary work in the field. It reviews the multiple directions, methodological approaches, and theoretical leanings that comprise today's diversified field of disaster anthropology and discusses how the monographs included in the special edition of Human Organ…
Critical aspects of social networks in a resettlement setting
Each year, more than 30 million people worldwide are displaced by disaster, development, and conflict. The sheer magnitude of displacement points to a need for wider application of social science theories and methodologies to the special problems posed by these crises. We are convinced that social network analysis of the structure and development of social relations can help to identify variables and patterns essential to maintaining or fostering…
Postdisaster reciprocity and the development of inequality in personal networks
Within the context of major changes in economics, population distribution, and lifestyles around the world, people continue to rely on personal relationships for support. People also often create or find themselves in relationships that are alternatively asymmetrical or balanced. In this study, we are interested in how people face acute or chronic hazards and how asymmetrical or balanced exchange relationships are associated with different types …
Patterns of preference and practice: Bridging actors in wildfire response networks in the American Northwest
The roles of bridging actors in emergency response networks can be important to disaster response outcomes. This paper is based on an evaluation of wildfire preparedness and response networks in 21 large‐scale wildfire events in the wildland—urban interface near national forests in the American Northwest. The study investigated how key individuals in responder networks anticipated seeking out specific people in perceived bridging roles prior to t…
Afterward: Preparing for uncertainties
As the frequency and intensity of disasters increase around the world in the context of a changing climate, the likelihood that disasters will impact anthropological field sites increases. Therefore, disasters will increasingly become an expected component of anthropological work. In this article, the authors discuss the ways in which risk, hazards, and disasters will change anthropological research, practices, and methodologies as a whole
Disaster vulnerability in anthropological perspective
In the study of disasters, the concept of vulnerability has been primarily employed as a cumulative indicator of the unequal distributions of certain populations in proximity to environmental and technological hazards and an individual or group ability to "anticipate, cope with, resist and recover" from disaster (Wisner et al. 2004). This concept has influenced disaster research as a means to question how natural, temporary, and random disasters …
Continuity and change in the applied anthropology of risk, hazards, and disasters
This article introduces the special issue of The Annals of Anthropological Practice on "Continuity and Change in the Applied Anthropology of Risk, Hazards, and Disasters." After reviewing the factors that account for the heightened anthropological attention to disasters in the early 21st century, I review each of the contributions to the special issue. The topics included in the special issue represent some of the simultaneously perennial and cur…
Social Network Analysis of Disaster Response, Recovery, and Adaptation
Enduring Cooperation: Time, Discipline, and Minga Practice in Disaster-induced Displacement and Resettlement in the Ecuadorian Andes
This paper presents a study of an Andean form of cooperation, the minga, in a disaster-affected community and a disaster-induced resettlement––both due to volcanic eruption—in the Andean highlands of Ecuador. I explore factors affecting the continuity of minga practice post disaster and reveal some of the largely temporal tensions between wage labor and minga practice. However, I argue that much of the variation in inter-household minga participa…
Introduction: Twenty-First Century Dynamics of Cooperation and Reciprocity in the Andes
Reciprocity and Vernacular Statecraft: Andean Cooperation in Post-disaster Highland Ecuador
Obreros cooperativos conocidos en toda la región andina comomingas, aunque exteriormente aparecen como la misma institución cultural, se practican de manera muy diferente y con distintos significados en diferentes contextos. Este estudio analiza cómo la cooperación minga llegó a exhibir patrones contrastantes, pero íntimamente relacionados, de prácticas y relaciones sociales, tanto en un pueblo afectado y desplazado por un desastre y un reasentam…
Petit capitalisms in disaster, or the limits of neoliberal imagination: Displacement, recovery, and opportunism in highland Ecuador
Disaster capitalism is typically defined as a systematic and opportunistic reconfiguration of economies and economic regulations in service of capitalist interests under the cover of environmental crisis. This article offers another complementary variety of disaster capitalism—the production of capitalist subjects, petit capitalists “empowered” by the state and nongovernmental organizations via initiation into the special knowledge and crafts of …
Social production of disasters and disaster social constructs: An exercise in disambiguation and reframing
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine whether it is useful to tease apart the intimately related propositions of social production and social construction to guide thinking in the multidisciplinary study of disasters. Design/methodology/approach The authors address our question by reviewing literature on disasters in the social sciences to disambiguate the concepts of social production and social construction. Findings The authors hav…
What Can We Learn from Practitioners' Stories
What's in Your Bag, Anthropologists
Disaster and Climate Change-Related Displacements and Resettlements
This chapter focuses on displacement and resettlement associated principally with disasters and climate change. The aforementioned processes constitute imminent risks and human rights crises, and in the case of climate change these are most pronounced for coastal peoples around the globe. The novelty lies in the invocation of climate change to legitimize resettlement. Resettlements are politically charged environments involving complex negotiatio…
Entangled Roots and Otherwise Possibilities: An Anthropology of Disasters Covid-19 Research Agenda
We develop questions for a COVID-19 research agenda from the anthropology of disasters to study the production of pandemic as a feature of the normatively accepted societal state of affairs. We encourage an applied study of the pandemic that recognizes it as the product of connections between people, with their social systems, nonhumans, and the material world more broadly, with attention to root causes, (post)colonialism and capitalism, multispe…
Mythopolitics of “community”: An unstable but necessary category
Purpose The authors engage a set of critical discussions on key concepts in disaster studies with attention to recent critiques of the concept “community,” which decry the term's imprecision and problematic insinuation of consensus. The authors’ objective is to explore for enduring and redeeming merit in the use of the term in disaster prevention, response and recovery and in collaborative social science research more broadly. Design/methodology/…
Is Vulnerability an Outdated Concept? After Subjects and Spaces
Theories of vulnerability have constituted the conceptual core of the anthropology of disaster for roughly 40 years. Yet, there is an undercurrent of disquiet among disaster scholars and community leaders who worry that vernacular uses of vulnerability can be insulting to individuals and communities with whom we work, and/or with whom we identify. There is a growing discomfort that categorizing the "vulnerable" acts to discursively nullify the ev…
Japantown Prepared And Organizational Studies: Campus-Community Partnerships For Disaster Preparedness
Universities and community-based organizations partner to provide benefits to students and to communities where universities are situated. We examine the core elements of a successful partnership in a case study of an ongoing collaboration between San José State University (SJSU) and Japantown Prepared, a community-based organization whose mission is to advance disaster preparedness at the household and community level within San José, California…
Building Community-Level Disaster Preparedness Through Small Business Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Marketing
Japantown Prepared, a community-based disaster preparedness organization in San José, California’s historic Japantown, began a long-term partnership with the Department of Anthropology and the Organizational Studies Program at San José State University in 2016. This article is a study of one of their many collaborative projects, a disaster preparedness Business Certification Project meant to foster the development of disaster preparedness in the …
De La Investigación Aplicada a la Acción Participativa, Parte II: Y Ahora, ¿que? Diálogos Comunitarios y Redescubriendo Nuestras Comunidades
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation A.J. Faas, María del Rosario Marcelo Brito; De La Investigación Aplicada a la Acción Participativa, Parte II: Y Ahora, ¿que? Diálogos Comunitarios y Redescubriendo Nuestras Comunidades. Practicing Anthropology 1 March 2021; 43 (2): 28–33. doi: https:…
From Applied Research to Participatory Action, Part II: Y Ahora, ¿que? Community Dialogues and Rediscovering Our Communities
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation A.J. Faas, María del Rosario Marcelo Brito; From Applied Research to Participatory Action, Part II: Y Ahora, ¿que? Community Dialogues and Rediscovering Our Communities. Practicing Anthropology 1 March 2021; 43 (2): 34–38. doi: https://doi.org/10.177…
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (25 works) · Disaster Management and Resilience (17 works) · Geography (15 works) · Law (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Economics (9 works) · Social science (9 works) · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration (7 works)