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The present effects of transnational corporations (TNCs) on social, health, and environmental aspects of local societies have a long history. The pre-conditions for the insertion of the types of economic initiatives now seen in the Global South, and driven by TNCs, were set through histories of colonialism and development schemes. These initiatives disrupted local economies and modified environments, delivering profound effects on livelihoods. These effects were experienced as structural violence, and have produced social suffering through the decades.

In this paper, we compare two African cases across time; the conjunction of development initiatives and structural adjustment in the Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe in the early 1990s and industrial plantation forestry in present-day Uganda. Each case presents a specific constellation of political and economic forces that has produced prejudicial effects on local populations in their time period of application and are, essentially, different versions of structural violence that produce social suffering. While each case depicts a specific type of violent encounter manifest at a particular historical moment, these are comparable in the domains of environmental impacts, disruptions to societies, co-opting of local economies, disordering of systems of meaning and social reproduction, and nefarious effects on well-being. We analyze the conjunction of these effects through a theoretical lens of structural violence and social suffering. Our analysis draws particular attention to the role of TNCs in driving this structural violence and its effects.

The importance of onset speed has been stressed by disaster researchers and inter-governmental bodies for some time, but its meaning and knowledge frontier has not been explored in depth. The purpose of this paper is to contextualise disasters involving slow-onset hazards within the broader literature on disasters, assess the current state of knowledge and identify themes in the literature.

This paper employs a semi-structured review design with the purpose of identifying both scholarship engaging directly with the term and less obvious but related literatures.

The majority of publications that mention slow-onset hazards and their adverse impacts do so only by means of delimitation. The paper finds that there is a great need for empirical and theoretical work on onset and manifestation speed and to test the degree to which existing theories and frameworks of disaster management are also relevant for the study of slow-onset hazard impacts.

The review identifies several gaps in existing research disasters involving slow-onset hazards and proposes research on community, political, policy and practical challenges, including answering the question of how to secure proactive response to emerging slow-onset hazard impacts.

In theory, hazards with a gradual and creeping onset are easier to manage and proactively respond to than that of sudden and unexpected ones. Not only do slow-onset hazards provide more lead time, but also a larger potential for proactive response, which in turn provides ample time to take early action to cushion their impacts. Yet, warnings often go unheard and response is put on hold until impacts become unnecessarily costly to reverse. More research on onset speed and gradual manifestation patterns should therefore be carried out.

Gradually occurring hazards have remained largely absent from the core literature on disasters, including most definitions of the term. This paper represents an initial effort to assess the state-of-the-art on the concept and the phenomenon of disasters involving slow-onset hazards.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on race and place.

The approach used by the authors is to combine an overview of sociological debates on place within a framework that makes the case for a relational approach to race, space and place.

The overview provides an account of place in sociology, of the relationality of race and place, and the making of race and place in sociological work.

The Introduction sets the papers in context, providing a short account of each of them; it also aims to present an argument for attention to race and place in sociology in a setting characterized by racism and reaction.

Education in Emergencies (EiE) as a subfield of Comparative and International Education (CIE) has played a vital role in advocating for the world’s most vulnerable people with a focus on short-term responses to specific events like conflict and natural disasters that often occur in the Global South. However, recent events, like the protests exposing structural racial and gender inequality, the COVID-19 pandemic, and multiple global “slow” conflicts, have revealed a different nature of modern emergencies where issues, which are often considered important but not urgent, can quickly become emergencies under the right circumstances or have in fact always been so. Accordingly, in this chapter, we reimagine a broader framework for EiE which includes long-term, systemic, and universal challenges that affect both the Global North and South. The chapter includes a historical review of EiE as a subfield within CIE along with evidence of new forms of modern emergencies in the United States, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, and Syria that build toward a broader framework of EiE intended for both CIE scholars and practitioners.

The domain of study on mediated suffering is ensconced within an Orientalist paradigm which ideologically structures our visuality and gaze. The consignment of suffering through bodies of alterity and the geo-politics of the Global South encodes the coloniality of power as a dominant reading. It then naturalizes the West as the voyeur in its consumption of the abject bodies of the Global South. Creating a binary through this East-West polarization in the oeuvre of suffering as a realm of study, it creates the hegemony of the West as the moral guardian of suffering, imbuing it with the right to accord pity and compassion to the lesser Other. Beyond elongating the Orientalist trajectory which lodged the body politic of the Global South as a sustained ideological site of suffering, it hermeneutically seals the East as irredeemable, ordaining it through the gaze over the Other as a mode of coloniality. In countering this Eurocentric proposition, this chapter contends that this coloniality of gaze needs further rumination and new sensibilities in the study of mediated suffering, particularly following 9/11 and the shifting of the geo-politics of suffering in which the West is dispossessed through its own manufactured ideologies of the ‘War on Terror’ such that it is under constant threat of terrorist attacks and through the movement of the displaced Other into the Global North. Besieged and entrapped through its own pathologies of risks and threats, the West is projected through its own victimhood and the politics of the Anthropocene within which risks are seemingly democratized by environmental degradation as an overarching threat for all of humanity. Despite these shifts in the global politics, the scholarship of suffering is locked into this polarity. The chapter interrogates this innate crisis within this field of scholarship.

This article examines US official and public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic for insights into future policy and pubic responses to global climate change.

This article compares two contemporary global threats to human health and well-being: the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. We identify several similarities and differences between the two environmental phenomena and explore their implications for public and policy responses to future climate-related disasters and disruptions.

Our review of research on environmental and public health crises reveals that though these two crises appear quite distinct, some useful comparisons can be made. We analyze several features of the pandemic for their implications for possible future responses to global climate change: elasticity of public responses to crises; recognition of environmental, health, racial, and social injustice; demand for effective governance; and resilience of the natural world.

This paper examines public and policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic for their implications for mitigating and adapting to future climate crises.

The burnt-out Grenfell tower is a symbol of trauma and sacrificed lives. The brutalist block as a technology of trauma, viewed through its mediated depictions, reveals its condemned predicament between slippages in bureaucracy and governance. Through the formal enquiry into the disaster, the Grenfell victims' trauma is revived, replayed and contained within an archive in which victimhood is captured in a number of stages. The charred remains of the tower as a chronotrope of trauma and of lives cut short yields readings into the politics of social housing, gentrification and social displacement. The testimonials from Grenfell are temporally elongated both through the public review but also in the traces of victims' narratives left on social media in real time through flesh witnessing and as an online repository of death narratives. As a tower of trauma and as the forensic evidence of a disaster, Grenfell is part of the iconography of the ‘blackened’ and their necroaesthetics.