| Disasters are objects which appear to be obvious and real, but are, in part, socially constructed through work performed by representatives of the Canadian Government. There is an ongoing state project of legibility designed to simplify complex sets of real-life events into objects manipulable by state officials. The administrative simplification processes are similar to those employed by scientists seeking to portray scientific knowledge, constructed within local, subjective contexts, as objective and universal. I begin by reviewing literature concerning state projects of legibility and the sociology of science, and then move to analyze Canadian federal legislation and policy in order to argue that these discourses work to constitute their target phenomena, ‘emergencies’ and ‘disasters’, through their simultaneous clarification and obfuscation. I include two case studies of events which were granted federal funding as disasters, in order to highlight the constructed and mutable nature of the object ‘disasters’ within state activities. |
