The Disaster Studies Initiative at the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies is pleased to present
Aidan Seale-Feldman
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame
Abstract: What does a disaster generate? Anthropologists of disaster have long argued that catastrophes reveal hidden truths about society and act as catalysts for transformation. In this work, a key issue at stake is how certain transformations and visions for the future are prioritized while others are not. Drawing on long term, ethnographic fieldwork on mental health governance in Nepal following the 2015 earthquakes, this talk develops a critical phenomenology of disaster to show how a priori frames of “crisis” and “loss” shape and constrain post-disaster response and its imaginaries of repair. The analysis of the frames that organize perception is urgent in times of disaster, when the act of conceptualization is both morally and politically charged. To think about disaster phenomenologically is to track what I call the work of disaster—how the movements of the earth are perceived through historically-situated processes of collective intentionality, and the rippling aftereffects of these objectifications. I suggest that approaching disaster through the method of critical phenomenology can help us follow collective processes of disorientation and reorientation and the ways a seismic rupture creates possibilities for building the world back otherwise.
Aidan Seale-Feldman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her research explores psychic life and the ethics of care through the ethnographic study of disaster, collective affliction, and novel therapeutic interventions in the Himalayas and the United States. Set in the time of the 2015 earthquakes, her forthcoming book, "The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care along a Himalayan Fault Line" (University of Chicago Press, 2025) moves between Kathmandu NGO offices, steep mountain trails, psychosocial interventions, and earthquake-affected villages as it tells the story of an emergent “mental health crisis” and the forms of care that followed in disaster’s wake. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation, Aidan’s current research project, 'Ethical Substance: Psychedelic Medicine in Times of Social and Spiritual Crisis', explores the incorporation of mystical experience in to the lives of secular Americans and their therapeutic practices. Aidan’s work has been published in Cultural Anthropology; Ethos; South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies; the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal; Anthropology News; and Somatosphere, among others.
This talk is the Closing Keynote of the CMES conference Disasters in and of the Middle East: Event, Place, Intensity, organized by Cemal Kafadar, Elif Irem Az, Jesse Howell, and Evangeline McGlynn.
Contact: Liz Flanagan
LOCATION:CGIS South Bldg, Rm S020, Belfer Case Study Rm, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA 02138 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20250330T193000Z DTEND:20250330T210000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR