The Project analyzes how extreme events reveal the political work involved in positioning disposable groups and individuals outside nation-states’ imaginaries. Having as case studies the Barh Mukti Abhiyaan grassroots movement and the National Dalit Watch in India, the objective is to propose an analytical approach, based on an ‘ecology of knowledges’ and counter-hegemonic human rights struggles, that consolidate civic epistemologies pertaining to disasters and catastrophes. These civic epistemologies emerge from the accumulated experiences of the local and excluded populations that support their actions in mutual help, solidarity and the construction of disaster communities that develop the ability to resist, to recover and to re-establish bonds, livings and their inhabited places.
This analysis is proposed, having as background the changing role of States in disaster- management promoted by international agencies that consolidate disaster-capitalism, of which India is a case after the enactment of Disaster Management Act of 2005.