22 November 2024 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100
Cécile Stehrenberger (Univ. of Wuppertal)
“Doing Science in the Eye of the Storm: Social Science Disaster Research, 1949-1994”
During the Cold War, several US social science “disaster research groups” conducted hundreds of fields studies after floods, earthquakes, and factory explosions. My presentation explores their research goals, their scientific practices, and their findings, analyzing transformations and continuities in the knowledge production process. I will elaborate on how the “anchoring practice” of disaster research, the conduct of rapid response fields studies in post-disaster zones, was connected to a specific understanding of disasters as concentrated events and as natural “laboratories” for developing general theories of human behavior. Moreover, I will show how disaster research was based on practices of othering, and demonstrate how a combination of socio-structural and cultural factors prevented disaster research, during the period I study, from becoming “critical” disaster studies.
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Cécile Stephanie Stehrenberger is an assistant professor for Historical Comparative Studies of Science and Technology at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. After receiving her PhD from the University of Zurich, she has taught at the Universities of Braunschweig and Erfurt, and was a visiting scholar at the IAS in Princeton, the CSDS in Delhi, and the CALAS Center for Advanced Latin American Studies in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her research focuses on the history of disaster science, the entangled history of toxic waste, as well as on the memory of slow disasters.