Slow violence to disasters: Exploring racialized topographies and contextualizing social vulnerability to flood and other environmental risks

摘要: In traditional disaster scholarship, social vulnerability is a framework that leverages individual variables to explore stratification in the instance of disaster. As this body of literature has grown, we have lost more context as to why these variables are used within various applications. However, slow violence is another framework that does not necessarily focus on disasters traditionally but provides the social and political context to understand why certain individuals may be of greater risk. In this article, we combine social vulnerability and slow violence in a framework to demonstrate how individuals and groups are not inherently vulnerable to hazards. We leverage documentation from public media and related literature to contextualize the history of slow violence in two US case studies, Bonton - Texas and North Brentwood - Maryland. Despite the spatial differences between the two African-American communities, they …