Failure to Respond: problematizing disaster in The Bahamas

Seminar in Critical Development Studies: Amelia Moore

Abstract

In the years since Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamian archipelago, leading to dozens of deaths, decimating infrastructure, and sending evacuees to surrounding islands and to the U.S., there has been a spike in the rhetoric around failure in the country. Many people, especially Bahamians, have observed that that centralized government failed to respond quickly and effectively, that many roads, buildings, shorelines, and homes failed to retain their functional integrity, and that everyday islanders themselves failed to prepare for a storm of that magnitude and intensity. Debates about national failures intersect with arguments made by anthropologists and critical geographers of disaster who situate Hurricane Dorian within long-term global and regional processes of ongoing socioecological disaster wrought by colonial extraction, exploitative racial capitalism, and postcolonial dependency. Based on my ongoing collaborative research since 2019, and using The Bahamas and Caribbean Hurricanes as primary examples, this talk will explore arguments about the location and scale of disaster-related failure, accountability, and resilience. How do we know what constitutes failure, how do hurricanes change shape and meaning, what happens to socioecological boundaries and political borders, how do we comprehend loss, damage, and repair, and how does all of that shift depending on the way disasters are problematized and by whom? 

About the speaker

I am an environmental anthropologist with over twenty years of experience studying island and coastal politics, the social effects of transnational environmental science and technology, and the inequities exacerbated by major global environmental changes like climate change, sea level rise, and biodiversity loss. I attempt to rigorously center equity and justice praxis in my research, teaching, and service within interdisciplinary STEM programs. This means working with a critical mass of experienced scholars to build a cohesive vision, committed leadership, and structural support for transformative program development.

My scholarship is multi-sited, including multiple geographic areas and problems, but it has always been designed to explore the effects of injustices like colonialism, white supremacy, knowledge hierarchies and exclusionary technologies, extractive geopolitics, and racial capitalism on environmental inequities like small island vulnerability, coastal dispossession, and climate imperialism. Empirically grounded in ethically oriented ethnographic praxis, I have focused on the foundational inequities that shape the relationships between environmental scientists and the people most impacted by their projects. My work has shown that it is not enough to design science-based environmental law and policy to ameliorate surface level inequities based in simple observations of the status quo. Instead, a deeper understanding of historical, contemporary, and potential future inequities is needed, along with the capacity to gauge how foundational inequities produce feedback loops across generations, molding technologies, techniques, concepts, and questions, transforming land and seascapes, and limiting the possibility to define what constitutes justice and the environment in the first place. My work informs governance institutions and policy interventions in directly accounting for these wide-ranging, largely hidden processes.

About the series

The Critical Development Studies Seminar Series is a graduate student-led effort that aims to provide space for junior scholars to share innovative research and discuss emergent debates within critical development studies.

Invited speakers cover a range of geographical areas, disciplinary backgrounds, and research topics. Examples of potential topics include agroecology and food justice issues, state-building, land and labor, extractivist politics, the gendered and racial dynamics of ongoing capitalist development, and the political ecological histories of the global development project. The target audience for the series is graduate students and faculty interested in critical development studies both within the Cornell community as well as external scholars.

Seminar organizers for 2026-27 are Josefina Rodriguez Pletikosic, Diyang Lin, Rachel Bezner Kerr, Aaron Benanav, and Mariah Doyle-Stephenson.