Exploring Disaster Risk and Vulnerability in Society Swimming for pigs: Reframing vulnerability through reflections on culture and space in stories of disaster from a coastal community in Mexico and the Philippines

Critical theory scholars have long framed disaster risk in cultural terms, however, risk management practitioners are still applying a reductionist approach to mapping risk, equating it to the product of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. What is problematic about this approach is that vulnerability encompasses complex social and cultural processes that are scantly captured with current practices. Without better accounting for vulnerability and community resiliencies, risk maps fail as policy and planning instruments; worse, they irresponsibly label communities ‘at risk’ and are weaponized to dispose people from their land and de-value their place. Community narrated disaster experiences analyzed under assemblage theory framed through a socio-spatial lens reveal findings that transcend the academic-practitioner divide to offer applied recommendations for vulnerability elements that more thoroughly reflect its complexities. Additionally, these findings assert that risk maps and assessments will never completely capture vulnerability due to complexity and continual temporal transformations and should therefore never be use in isolation to make policy and planning decisions.