Speaker: Irina Rafliana, Center for Life Ethics, University of Bonn, National Agency for Research and Innovation (BRIN), Indonesia
What is a tsunami, beyond the waves themselves? Scientific advancements have greatly improved our ways and abilities to understand, model, and anticipate tsunamis. Yet when waves reach coastlines, they encounter far more than physical landscapes. They meet histories, memories, livelihoods, cultural beliefs, non-human beings, and all the complex relationships between people and nature. These encounters shape how risks are experienced, understood, remembered, forgotten, or governed. Drawing on empirical experiences in Indonesia, this presentation explores tsunamis not merely as destructive geophysical events, but as relational phenomena that connect social and Earth processes. It invites us to reconsider how different ways of knowing and living with uncertainties, on the one hand, enrich scientific understanding of risk, and on the other hand remind us of the limits of knowledge and technology.
To explore these entanglements, the presentation follows the movements of tsunami knowledge across diverse communities, scientific practices, technologies, and warning institutions; the presentation examines the Indonesian Tsunami Warning System as a living socio-technical assemblage, shaped by human and non-human relations, emotions, and politics. Through the concept of epistemic oscillation, it traces how tsunami events reshape scientific knowledge, technologies, and institutional priorities, while periods between events bring different rhythms of attention and preparedness. In doing so, the presentation invites reflections on how science is itself situated within the changing worlds it seeks to understand and to protect. Tsunamis do not merely transform coastlines; they unsettle what we know, reveal what we overlook, and reshape how we live with the volatile Earth.
