"Hidden Disasters”: Unexposed Element(s) of Sociotechnical Accidents

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

STS scholarship has shown that many sociotechnical disasters expose the messiness of our technological world, display the tight interdependency of society and technoscience, and reveal the vulnerabilities of our risk societies. While we have gained crucial insights on the nature of disasters, such as that there is no such thing as “natural” or “technological” disasters but only sociotechnical ones, and that understanding the politics of disaster matters in how the disasters are handled and managed, sometimes there are elements of a disaster that remain hidden, unclear, or unexplained. They may include the unexplored circumstances that led to the disaster, the “actual” causes of a “natural” disaster, the plight of the disaster victims, or a “hidden” agenda behind a disaster’s cleanup and mitigation efforts. Included in this category is “unexpected disasters,” i.e. unpredicted catastrophes that resulted from the specific construction and organization of our sociotechnical systems. This open panel invites paper abstracts that critically examine unexposed factors of a disaster and/or the explanation of why these elements were initially “hidden,” or of disasters that occurred “unexpectedly” as a result of a specific arrangement and management of a sociotechnical system. Paper abstracts that compare two of these so-called “hidden disasters” are also welcome.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Anto Mohsin, Northwestern University in Qatar

Individual Presentations

• Punctuated Equilibriums: The Co-Production of Institutions, Culture, and Wildfire - Eric Kennedy, Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes - Arizona State University

• The Shipwrecked Case of Cijin 25 Ladies and the Stigmatization of Wooden Boats - Wen-hui Anna Tang, National Sun Yat-sen University

• Radioactive and On Fire: Living in an Uncertain Community - Kristen Michelle Kalz, University of Missouri-Columbia

• Ecological Cost Shifting - A Case Study of the Indian Shipbreaking Industry - STUTI HALDAR, CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF GUJARAT

• On Decision-making and Preparedness of Japanese Government before and after the Fukushima Accident - Masashi Shirabe, Tokyo Institute of Technology