Sociology of disasters

This fifth session of the seminar organised by GRETS, "Sociology of dissasters", will be attended by Benoît Giry - Sciences Po Rennes. The session will be introduced by Ferenc Fodor - EDF R&D - GRETS.

In the common sense, the notion of “catastrophe” refers to disastrous events such as the one triggered by the Bhopal factory explosion, the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, the 2011 Fukushima tsunami, the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes in Turkey or Cyclone Chido in Mayotte in 2024. In sociology, “catastrophes” designate disruptions to social life linked to the destruction of the physical capital on which it is based and/or the removal of the individuals who make it up.

Between 1950 and 2020, the number of disasters occurring worldwide each year is estimated to have increased 15-fold. They are therefore more frequent, and their intensity is reputedly greater. The social and political implications of such disasters seem to be becoming increasingly significant. Their economic cost is also rising: by 2023, disasters had destroyed almost $250 billion worth of goods. There is no sign that this trend will be reversed in the years to come. As the ways in which the social world reproduces itself seem to rest on increasingly unstable material, ecological and political foundations, these disturbances seem to be becoming the normal operating regime of human societies.

How can we study these phenomena? And what do they tell us about social life? Benoit Giry's presentation offers some answers to these questions, based on a corpus drawn from the sociology of catastrophes. He will look back at how sociologists have dealt with the “catastrophe” object, what they have been able to say about its causes, its social effects and the way we try to govern them. In so doing, he will outline what could be a research program for the sociology of disasters in the future.

• Benoit Giry is a lecturer in sociology at Sciences Po Rennes and a researcher at the Arènes laboratory (CNRS UMR 6051). Following work in economic sociology and the sociology of work, his research focuses on the social effects of disasters. He is the author of Sociologie des catastrophes, published in 2023 by La découverte.

• Giry, B. (2023). Sociologie des catastrophes. La découverte, Paris.
• Giry, B. (2023). «“RestezChezVous” ou l’Etat sanitaire distribué. Sociologie des contributions numériques ordinaires à la mise en œuvre du confinement ». Gouvernement et action publique, 4 (12), 31-59.
• Giry, B. (2020). « Résilience territoriale ». In : Cole, A., Guignier, S., Pasquier, R. (dir.). Dictionnaire des politiques territoriales. Presses de Sciences Po, Paris.