This article explores the materiality of disaster politics through the practice of mapping during the 2007 wildfires in Southern California. It examines the process of production of two different maps, the maps produced by San Diego County and a popular Google My Map created by local media and academic institutions, in order to explore how an unfolding disaster comes to be understood. This article argues that the interplay between different technological and human entities to produce each map in turn produced different spaces of disaster in ways that challenged priorities of disaster preparedness and response. Specifically, the different mapping practices in 2007 produced different relationships to temporality, boundaries and responsibility, making different aspects of the disaster visible while constructing different threats and definitions of danger. They juxtaposed representational and relational knowledge as well as the value of prevention and demonstration. This article draws on data collected through textual analysis of government and scientific documents as well as interviews and observations of key actors, their mapping practices, and socio-technological networks.
AlačM., (2008), ‘Working with brain scans: digital images and gestural Interaction in fMRI laboratory’, Social Studies of Science, 38 (4): 483–508.
2.
BarriosR., (2011), ‘Post-Katrina neighborhoods recovery planning in New Orleans’, in DowtyR. and IrwinA. (eds), Dynamics of Disasters, 97–114, Washington DC: Earthscan.
3.
BeaulieuA., (2010), ‘From co-location to co-presence: shifts in the use of ethnography for the study of knowledge’, Social Studies of Science, 40 (3): 453–470.
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, (2008), 2007 Wildfire Activity Statistics, State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. Sacramento, CA: State Printing Office.
6.
California and United States, (2008), California Fire Siege 2007: An Overview, Sacramento, CA: California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
7.
County of San Diego Geographic Information Systems, (2008), Emergency Standards of Operation, San Diego, CA: SANGIS.
8.
County of San Diego, Office of Emergency Services, (2007), 2007 San Diego County Firestorms After Action Report, San Diego: EG&G Technical Services.
9.
CrononW., (1996), ‘The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature’, in CrononW. (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, 69–90, New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
10.
DavisM., (1998), Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, New York: Vintage Books.
11.
FortunK., (2001), Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
12.
FortunK., (2009). ‘Figuring out ethnography’, in FaubianJ. and MarcusG. (eds), Fieldwork Is Not What it Used to Be, 167–183, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
13.
FrickelS. and VincentM. B., (2011), ‘Katrina's contamination: regulatory knowledge gaps in the making and unmaking of environmental contention’, in DowtyR. and IrwinA. (eds), Dynamics of Disasters, 11–28, Washington DC: Earthscan.
14.
GandyM., (2002), Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
15.
GoodwinC., (1995), ‘Seeing in depth’, Social Studies of Science, 25: 237–274.
16.
HarleyJ. B., (1989), ‘Deconstructing the map’, Cartographica, 26 (2): 1–20.
17.
HendersonK., (2011), ‘Mind maps, memory and relocation after Hurricane Katrina’, in DowtyR. and IrwinA. (eds), Dynamics of Disasters, 77–97, Washington DC: Earthscan.
18.
HilgartnerS., (2007), ‘Overflow and containment in the aftermath of disaster’, Social Studies of Science, 37 (1): 153–158.
19.
HoffmanS. and Oliver-SmithA., (2002), ‘Introduction: why anthropologists should study disasters’, in HoffmanS. and Oliver-SmithA. (eds), Catastrophe and Culture: the Anthropology of Disaster, 3–22, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
JordanK. and LynchM., (1992), ‘The sociology of a genetic engineering technique: ritual and rationality in the performance of the plasmid prep’, in ClarkeA. and FujimuraJ. (eds), The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in 20th Century Life Sciences, 77–144, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
22.
KlinenbergE., (2002), Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
23.
KochT., (2011), Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
24.
LatourB., (1987), Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
25.
LatourB., (1999), ‘Circulating reference: sampling the soil in the Amazon Forest’, in Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, 24–79, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
26.
LynchM., (1991), ‘Laboratory space and the technological complex: an investigation of topical contextures’, Science in Context, 4 (1): 81–109.
27.
McDowellL., (1999), Gender, Place, Identity: Understanding Feminist Geographies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
28.
MichaelM., (2002), Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature: From Society to Heterogeneity, London: Routledge.
29.
MonmonierM., (1997), Cartographies of Danger, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
30.
Oliver-SmithA., (2002), ‘Theorizing disasters’, in HoffmanS. and Oliver-SmithA. (eds),Catastrophe and Culture: the Anthropology of Disaster, 23–48, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
31.
PinchT., and BijkerW., (1984), ‘The social construction of facts and artefacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other’, Social Studies of Science, 14 (3): 399–441.
32.
RoseG., (1993), Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
SpirnA., (1996), ‘Constructing nature: the legacy of Frederick Law Olmstead’, in CrononW. (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, 91–113, New York: W.W. Norton&Co.
35.
SuchmanL., (2000), ‘Embodied practices of engineering work’, Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7 (1&2): 4–18.
36.
SuchmanL., (2007), Human-machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
37.
ThriftN. and AminA., (2002), Cities: Reimagining the Urban, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
38.
TierneyK.BevcC. and KuligowskiE., (2006), ‘Metaphors matter: disaster myths, media frames, and their consequences in Hurricane Katrina’, Shelter from the Storm: Repairing the National Emergency Management System after Hurricane, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 604, Katrina: 57–81.
39.
TsingA., (2005), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
40.
WeaverB., (1996), ‘“What to do with the mountain people?” The darker side of the successful campaign to establish the Great Smoky Mountains National Park’, in CantrillJ. and OravecC. (eds), The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and our Creation of the Environment, 151–175, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.
41.
WeichselgartnerJ. and BreviereE., (2011), ‘The 2002 flood disaster in the Elbe Region, Germany: a lack of context-sensitive knowledge’, in DowtyR. and IrwinA. (eds), Dynamics of Disasters, 141–158, Washington DC: Earthscan.
WoodD., and FelsJ., (2009), The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
44.
WoolgarS., (1991), ‘Configuring the user: the case of usability trials’, in A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, 58–99, London: Routledge.
45.
WynneB., (1992), ‘Misunderstood misunderstanding: social identities and public uptake of science’, Public Understanding of Science, 1 (3): 281–304.
