A rescue team in the making: Negotiating time and knowledge against the expected Istanbul Earthquake

This thesis ethnographically explores an urban search and rescue (USAR) team in İstanbul, currently undergoing accreditation training for official recognition. It aims to critically engage with the existing literature on earthquakes in Turkey, which has so far revolved around technocratic solutionism, treating disaster knowledge as a product of neutral scientific accumulation. To offer another perspective, this work emphasizes how daily social interactions among (prospective) disaster professionals -who are also potential survivors in Istanbul's seismic riskscape- can generate an emergent disaster knowledge that exceeds a strict expert-victim polarity. Secondly, this work makes a humble contribution to the broader literature on impending emergencies, which dominantly dwells on the frameworks of risk and futurity to explain the governance of anticipated emergencies. It explores the limits of anticipatory logics in ensuring people's continued enrollment in risk mitigating behavior, in a context that is laden with the social trauma of recurrent devastating earthquakes, and an ongoing urban crisis which inhibits residents' capacities to take anticipatory action. This thesis will conclude by suggesting another possible disaster governance mechanism that pertains to social memory rather than risk. This rationale co-opts the prevalent discourses of forgetfulness that portray Turkish society as chronically amnesiac, in order to redistribute blame and responsibility in the context of recurrent disasters.