Index#: 07575
Will Count Towards Sociology MAJOR
Will Count Towards Sociology MINOR
Fukushima and Sandy are bell-weather events for modern society. Climate change will continue to be a point of political and social division, though its calamities will care nothing of that, bringing hell and high-water no matter what people think. Katrina and 9/11 threw into bold relief just how vulnerable we can be. There will be more of all that, and even more devastation that we are now only glimpsing. We are scarcely prepared. Yet the news is not all bad because risk, calamity, and disaster are intellectual opportunities, chances to look into how society works, and fails to work. There will be more big disasters, and the consequences from them will continue to be severe. The main reasons for these trends has to do with how society is organized. We usually think disasters are special but they are prosaic, part of rather than discontinuous with “normal” reality. In normal reality we must make sense of things. We excel at that, applying familiar categories to organize events, motives, and histories. Generically, disasters are not different from other events that need ordering. It is easy to imagine all kinds of non-disastrous things or times that must be confronted. “How shall I make sense of this?” we will ask. The social sciences have good if partial answers to that question. Disaster conspiracy theories are supreme sense-makers. Big disasters pose the question in a big way. This seminar will mainly be case-based, which means that I’ll organize the materials around particular events. Examples are accidents (Bhopal, Titanic, Challenger, Columbia) “natural” disasters (Katrina, the threat from near earth objects) and epidemics (1918 flu). But some of it will be organized analytically, as we inquire about similarities and differences between calamities. The focus will be on the interplay between culture, social institutions, and calamity. We will use video and internet resources throughout. We will survey major theories and findings regarding disaster, risk, and trauma. We will connect those theories and findings to “mainstream” theories. We will, in general, use disaster to see society.
About Professor Clarke
LEE CLARKE is a professor of Sociology who writes about organizations, failure, disaster, risk communication, and the boundaries between politics and science. His last work, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006. Clarke is currently writing a book about how science and politics meet, and don’t meet, regarding the loss of America’s wetlands and the idea of “coastal restoration.”