This seminar grapples with how groups of people understand and make sense of catastrophe and disaster. Using a case study approach, we begin with questions of how to conceptualize disaster. Are human-made catastrophes essentially different from or similar to natural disasters? Are natural disasters typically also human in origin? Does knowledge of natural disasters such as hurricanes and forest fires enable a more meaningful understanding of slavery and genocide—disasters that people create? Are colonial campaigns to remove indigenous people, to cite another example, comparable to modern genocide? How do concepts such as victim, perpetrator, and witness as well as ideas of collective memory, displacement, and trauma enable a more nuanced understanding of each case study of disaster? Lastly, what can our experiential knowledge of living during times of a pandemic tell us that other forms of knowledge recorded and preserved in archives, libraries, museums, and memorials cannot?
This interdisciplinary seminar introduces the scholarship on disaster, catastrophe, trauma, collective memory, and memorialization. We aim to develop a strong understanding of several key scholarly sources and ongoing public debates. Working across several disciplinary fields, we build a foundation using secondary sources, primary documents, testimonies, memoirs, graphic novels, and film. The seminar encourages students to develop their own research interests using the conceptual tools and analysis we build in our common readings and discussions.
About Judith Gerson
Professor Gerson is on the faculty in the Departments of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies and an affiliate faculty in the Department of Jewish Studies. A recipient of a residential research fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, She is co-editor of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories, Identities and Diasporas (Duke University Press, 2007). Currently, she is completing a book manuscript on German Jewish forced emigration during the Nazi era. Using feminist theories of intersectionality, and relying on archival evidence as well as in-depth interviews, she is analyzing how German Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York between 1933 and 1941 understood various aspects of their identities. This project follows earlier research on work and family structures that compares home-and office-based employment among clerical workers in the service sector.