New book by Clara De La Hoz Del Real

A new book by Clara De La Hoz Del Real, Los desplazados de los desastres, has been published by Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Published in December 2025, the book examines the social consequences of displacement caused by disasters, drawing on extensive ethnographic research with the population of Campo de la Cruz, Atlántico, following the rupture of the Canal del Dique in 2010.

At the heart of the book is a tension between the lived experience of people affected by disaster and the institutional categories used to describe them. Clara follows how people temporarily displaced by disaster become categorised as damnificados, and how this apparently administrative designation can progressively become a stigmatised social identity, affecting dignity, recognition and people’s place in the world.

The book is particularly relevant to the research trajectory that Clara has pursued alongside PREFER. Questions of displacement, categorisation, recognition and the lived experience of situations that profoundly disrupt people’s ways of inhabiting the world have been central to her work, and have also provided an important point of contact with PREFER’s broader enquiry into situations experienced as potentially terminal.

In this sense, Los desplazados de los desastres offers another perspective on questions that run through PREFER: what happens when an environment or way of life can no longer be inhabited in the same way, how such situations are named and categorised, and what these categories do to the people who have to live with them.
Editorial note: This publication is presented here as part of the broader research trajectory of a PREFER team member. It is not a PREFER project output, and should not be understood as a publication produced under the ERC project.

The book is published by Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.