Remembering Future Disasters

Disasters engage with time in diverse ways and cannot be fully understood as events or processes. Tomás Usón explores how time emerges from disastrous encounters. Building on ethnographic research in the Callejón de Huaylas, he analyses how cities in this Peruvian Andean region have responded to and anticipated extreme events over the past century. Inspired by the Quechua word tinkuy , or gathering in difference, this study invites readers to see disasters both as socio-material arrangements and moments where historical figures gather in conflicting ways: a valuable resource for those interested in disasters, memory, science and technology studies, decolonial perspectives, and Peruvian history.

Tomás Usón is a geographer and anthropologist from Santiago, Chile. His research examines the temporalities of disasters, ecological degradation and socioecological justice, drawing on approaches from science and technology studies and multispecies research. He completed his doctorate at the Institute of European Ethnology and the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2023, and works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography of the same university.