Acts of God, Man, and System: Knowledge, Technology, and the Construction of Disaster

• In Event: 262 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04.

Abstract

This paper proposes two additional dimensions in which to consider the role of knowledge and technology in the production of disaster risk: the conservation of catastrophe, and the epistemology of catastrophe. Previous literature primarily considered risk as a problem of failure or accident. This paper proposes that risks also accompany technological success, by creating new dependencies and expectations that may cause serious harm when disrupted or violated. Risk, as a problem of knowledge, is historically contingent. Its character is fundamentally shaped by the dominant knowledge paradigms of the period in which it is generated, experienced and examined. To illustrate the idea, this paper proposes three distinct periods in the construction of disaster as a public problem, each linked to changes in scientific knowledge for understanding the world and developments in technologies for manipulating it. These periods confront disaster, sequentially, as acts of God, acts of man, and consequences of global systems. The periods are: (1) the Enlightenment’s disenchantment of natural disaster following the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the attendant rise of the environmental sciences, (2) the statistical revolution in efforts to confront communicable diseases, urban fires, and the newly emerging problems of industrial and railway accidents in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and (3) the current notion of global anthropogenic catastrophe, genealogically rooted in the problem of nuclear war beginning in the 1950s and continuing to the present threats of global warming, emerging infectious diseases, terrorism, and cyber-disruption.

Author

• Ryan Alansson Lee Hagen, Columbia University