Event Date: Friday, April 30, 2021
University of California at Santa Barbara cordially invites participants to “Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster,” an interdisciplinary conference, which will be hosted virtually at the UCSB on Friday, April 30, 2021 at 9:00am-4:00pm (Pacific Time, US & Canada).
An international slate of speakers representing a variety of disciplines will share their insights and reflections during the week of the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. An associated Carsey-Wolf Center virtual discussion of the award-winning documentary “The Babushkas of Chernobyl,” with Director Holly Morris, will take place at 4pm (Pacific Time, US & Canada), on the preceding day, Thursday, April 29, 2021, before which registered participants can pre-screen the film. Further details about the program and participants and information on registering for both events can be found through the conference website: https://chernobyl.gss.ucsb.edu
Conference Description: Thirty-five years after the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the interdisciplinary virtual conference Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster considers its afterlife and reverberations in various disciplines, including culture and the arts. Situated at a watershed moment during the Cold War, Chernobyl has spawned an unprecedented quantity of global responses from scientists, writers, filmmakers, and artists, and it has become a key moment for the global environmental movement. This conference views the accident and its aftermath in the context of broader global ecologies of disaster and considers how catastrophe is coded and understood — or fails to be understood — through the prism of science, art, literature, and film. How do all these disciplines and discourses confront the disaster, and where do they converge to produce the fiction, or the truth, of what we call “Chernobyl”? The conference brings together scholars and experts in Comparative Literature, History, Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Nuclear Engineering, Medicine, Art, Film, and Germanic and Slavic Studies. (Rescheduled from April 2020 when it had to be postponed due to COVID-19.)