Education for Disaster Justice

Disasters reveal injustice in society; disasters create new injustices. These two intertwined ideas were the inspiration for an action research project, the first Disaster Haggyo, held across multiple locations in South Korea in the summer of 2022. The Disaster Haggyo—“haggyo” translates to “school” in Korean—was also an experiment in pedagogical methods. Science education, though not explicitly the aim of the Disaster Haggyo, infused every aspect of our approach. The Haggyo curriculum approaches innately technological disasters as entanglements of science, technology, and living organisms, inviting students to engage with unfolding disasters through tactics like citizen science, regulatory activism, and victim advocacy. The Disaster Haggyo was also created as a method for conducting research on the structural features of disaster injustice, in the mode of “action research,” to enable mutual aid and a dissolution of boundaries among researchers and those seeking disaster justice in two specific sites: Ansan and Jeju Island, South Korea. Specifically, our goal was to document and evaluate the ways in which (1) disaster memorialization and (2) disaster education practices empower survivors and bereaved families, and also the ways that such activities might also burden them, or even cause ongoing harm. Ansan, home of the Danwon High School, is the key site for Sewol Ferry Disaster bereaved family memorialization and activism. Jeju Island is both the site of the 1947–1954 Jeju Uprising and Massacre as well as a site of increasing environmental fragility in the climate change era. This paper argues that an articulation of disaster justice emerged as a key goal embedded in both memorialization and education activities across the various Disaster Haggyo research sites. Our interlocutors in these sites, in quite creative and surprising ways, insisted on justice as a language through which to interpret their lives and the lives (and deaths) of those for whom they cared most deeply.