Covid-19 is an unnatural disaster

Hope in revelatory moments of crisis

Bibliographic Data

ID5762338
AuthorsM Mostafanezhad (0000-0001-9819-5245, Geography and Environment, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume22
Issue3
Pages639-645
Publication date2020-05-26
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTourism Geographies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1461-6688 • E-ISSN: 1470-1340
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14616688.2020.1763446
OpenAlexW3024125543
LanguageEN
Citations received26
References cited14

The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has closed borders, grounded planes, quarantined more than half of the world's population, triggered anxiety en masse, and shaken global capitalism to its core. Scholars of the political ecology of disasters have sought to denaturalize so-called "natural" disasters by demonstrating their uneven consequences. Work in the political ecology of health similarly accounts for how risk of illness and disease are socio-economically mediated. While this scholarship has demonstrated the need to contextualize the unequal fallout from ecological and health disasters in ways that reveal the festering wounds of structural inequality, we know much less about how hope is cultivated in moments of crisis. The current revelatory moment of the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to find hope in the rubble through the deconstruction of framings of crisis as "error" and by homing in on the current and potential role of tourism to contribute to a more socially and environmentally just society. This reframing the pandemic as an "unnatural" disaster opens new debates at the intersection of tourism geographies and political ecologies of hope in revelatory moments of crisis

Capitalism · Cognitive reframing · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Deconstruction (building · Development economics · Disease · Economics · Environmental ethics · Infectious disease (medical specialty · Pandemic · Political ecology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Scholarship · Sociology · Tourism · Disaster Management and Resilience · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology · Ecology

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