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Thinking Through Disaster: STS in Late Industrialism

Thu, August 21, 11:00am to 1:00pm, Intercontinental Hotel, Chopin

Abstract

This presentation will address the intensifying significance of interdisciplinary, collaborative and comparative disaster research – with global scope – in the current historical period, a period that I have termed “late industrialism.” Beginning in the mid-1980s, marked heuristically by the 1984 Bhopal disaster, late industrialism is characterized by both acute and chronic disaster, emergent from tightly coupled ecological, technological, political, economic, social and cultural systems, many of which are over-extended, fractured by serial retrofitting, and notably difficult to visualize, conceptualize and coordinate response to. Late industrialism is also characterized by over-extended paradigms and disciplines, and incredible imbrication of commercial interest in knowledge production, in legal decisions, in governance at all scales. It is a period riven with hazards of many kinds (epistemic, eco-technological, political), which operate synergistically and cumulatively, requiring keen attention to what can’t be accounted for within entrenched discursive regimes. Research on and in late industrialism thus poses particular challenges, calling for something beyond extant theories of modernity and postmodernity, biopolitics, empire, and risk society. I’ll described how I have conceptualized and designed projects to address the challenges of late industrialism, entwining experimental ethnography with feminist, postcolonial and poststructural theorizations of language and meaning, looped into critical pedagogical practice. In process, I’ll strive to demonstrate the analytic and political significance of “thinking through disaster.”

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