Publication | Disasters, Continuity, and the Pathological Normal

by Ryan Hagen and Rebecca Elliott

The latest issue of Sociologica, guest-edited by INCITE-affiliate Ryan Hagen and Rebecca Elliott, thinks critically about the sociology of disasters in light of the Covid pandemic.

In the lead essay, Hagen and Elliott argue that “Sociology After COVID-19” needs to center “disaster” itself as an object of study and theory, and that doing so can productively reframe sociology’s fundamental concerns.

The essay advances two theses. First, while disasters are disruptive, they are not purely so; as they unfold, they enfold continuities such that they are best understood as a part of social reality rather than apart from it. Second, disasters are not pathological deviations from “normal” so much as they are the most salient manifestations of the ways that the normal is in fact pathological.

A more critical approach to disaster, they argue, can lead sociologists to examine more closely the interrelationship between the production of continuities and ruptures in social and economic life, enriching our understanding of core disciplinary concerns about social change, stratification, and inequality.

Read the full paper here.