Strategy on Disaster Recovery Management based on Graph Theory Concepts

The COVID-19 pandemic has asserted major baseline facts from disaster anthropology during the last three decades. Resilience could be based on the solution to the question: "What is the maximum amount of destruction, if any, that the graph (a network) can sustain while ensuring that at least one of each technology type remains and that the remaining induced subgraph is properly colored?" The concept of a graph's Chromatic Core Subgraph is a solution to the stated problem. In this paper, the pandemic graphs and certain sequential graphs are developed. For these graphs, the Chromatic core subgraph is obtained. The results of the pandemic graphs' Chromatic core subgraph are used to develop a disaster recovery strategy for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disaster Anthropology

Disaster Anthropology uses theoretical and methodological tools from across anthropological subfields to understand the effects of disasters. Anthropologists based in academia and practice, often working collaboratively or across disciplines, seek to understand the relationships among historical, social, cultural, economic, political, environmental, and climatic factors in every type of disaster and humanitarian crisis across the globe. Practitioners often work within disaster response agencies in such functions as policy reform, program design, and disaster response management. Academics work in anthropology and interdisciplinary centers and departments, studying and teaching about disaster and anthropological issues. Disaster anthropologists link closely with broader interdisciplinary disaster studies and practices. They contribute an anthropological, holistic, and long-term perspective, including the use of ethnography and participant observation, theories, and analyses. In the early 21st century there has been considerable, and constantly increasing, recognition of disaster anthropology. This area of work includes recognition of what disaster anthropology has to contribute and its place as an appropriate field of engagement for anthropologists. This recognition has been demonstrated by the publication of numerous books, chapters, articles, special journal issues, and hundreds of conference presentations. Disaster anthropology has gained the support of the major anthropology associations such as the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), resulting in the formation of specialized formalized bodies such as the Risk and Disaster Topical Interest Group (RDTIG) within the SfAA, and the Culture and Disaster Network (CADAN). Accordingly, there are also an increasing number of targeted university anthropology courses on disasters. Disaster anthropologists contribute to the overall understanding of how and why disasters have the impacts that they do and what the consequences of disasters can be. By examining disaster contexts, disaster anthropologists improve understanding of pre-existing circumstances that contribute to those disasters, including people’s perspectives on hazards, risks, uncertainty, inequality, and inequity. Disaster anthropologists have shown that disasters are the visible, explicit result of deeper and more complex processes. Anthropologists share this work in governmental, nongovernmental, academic, and public arenas. Disaster anthropology brings together critical lines of inquiry from the larger fields of anthropology and disaster studies, offering valuable perspectives not only on understanding but also on improving disaster conditions.

What's the problem with disaster? Anthropology, social work, and the qualitative slot

On March 3, 2019, an EF4 tornado devastated the rural Alabama communities of Beauregard and Smith Station, killing 23 people and causing direct injuries to another 97. This storm was unusually devastating, with twice the predicted casualty rate based on the tornado’s power, the impacted population, and impacted housing stock. In this paper, we apply qualitative methods from anthropology, geography, and planning to better understand the social context of this unusually devastating tornado. Recognizing that there are multiple formulations of the problem of disasters, we aim to highlight how interdisciplinary qualitative research can deepen our understanding of tornado disasters. Combining policy analysis, political economic critique, and ethnographic description, we seek to showcase how qualitative research enables us to interrogate and reimagine the problem of disasters. Rather than simply juxtaposing qualitative and quantitative methods, we emphasize how the heterogeneity of qualitative research methods can strengthen interdisciplinary research projects by generating dialogue about the multiple contexts relevant to understanding a social problem. While problem definition remains a central challenge to establishing a dialogue between anthropology and social work, here, we intend to extend this discussion to larger interdisciplinary collaborations. Situating the issue of problem formation within a broader ecology of qualitative inquiry, we highlight how dialogue about problem definition can, itself, produce meaningful insights into how we understand disasters.

Pollution, Health, and Disaster

The materiality of pollution is increasingly embodied in humans, animals, and the living environment. Ethnographic research, especially from within the fields broadly construed as medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, disaster anthropology, and science and technology studies are all positioned to make important contributions to understanding present lived experiences in disastrous environmental contexts. This article examines points of articulation within recent research in these areas, which have much in common but are not always in conversation with one another. Research and writing collaborations, as well as shared knowledge bases between ethnographic researchers who center different aspects of the spectrum of toxics- based environmental health, are needed to better account for and address the material and lived realities of increasing pollution levels in the time of a warming climate.

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 Organization (74[4]) on the applied anthropology of risks, hazards, and disasters showcase the variety of topics and themes engaged by applied anthropologists who work on disaster-related issues.

The Biopolitics of Disaster: Power, Discourses, and Practices

With the increase in frequency and visibility of disasters in contemporary state societies, national governments have developed a collection of agencies to manage catastrophic events. These institutions invariably deal with human populations as a political, scientific, and biological problem, an approach Michel Foucault described as biopolitical. In this article, I discuss some aspects of disaster governance, focusing on the long-term recovery process. Specifically, I analyze the fundamental biopolitical assumptions of the discourses and practices on the part of governmental disaster response agencies in São Luiz do Paraitinga, Brazil. In this case of biopolitical response to disaster, the discourses and practices implemented by governmental agencies created the illusion that state agencies successfully responded to the disaster by saving biological lives. This article shows how these biopolitcal discourses and practices also had the unintended and unacknowledged effects of devaluing social lives and abandoning disaster-affected populations. By calling attention to the unintended and unacknowledged effects of biopolitical governance, this article demonstrates how disaster anthropology can document and address the shortcomings of governmental disaster recovery policy and practice.