IFCO 2535 - The Nature of Disaster: a Global Environmental History

Disasters loom large in the news these days. The devastation and losses they cause certainly justify the attention devoted to them. Part of their haunting power, however, stems from the recognition that present-day disasters may announce an even more disastrous future on Earth in the wake of the climate and ecological breakdown. As much as they are central to contemporary cultural and political imagination, disasters are not new to our fraught present. On the contrary, they have accompanied the making of the modern world, and they have ceaselessly exposed the contradictions of modern ways of inhabiting the Earth. While we often think about them as discrete events, disasters are in fact always rooted in long-term processes: slow accumulations of causes that lead to a breaking point. This course aims to historicize disasters by showing, through case studies ranging from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake to Hurricane Katrina (2005), how they are always rooted in historically determined human interactions with nonhuman actors, processes, and forces. Second, by unpacking the histories of these disasters, it aims to show the structural linkages between disasters and the historical currents of modernity: technoscientific advances, globalization of exchanges, urbanization and industrialization. Disasters offer a unique window into the environmental dimension of these processes and into the project of mastery of nature that we have called modernity and its fundamental impossibility. Ultimately, the global history of disasters we will investigate in this course may help us to navigate better our menacing planetary present and, perhaps, imagine other ways of inhabiting the Earth.

Emilie PASQUIER,Giacomo PARRINELLO

Cours magistral seul

English

Weekly readings (articles and/or primary source material) plus research and reading for the final essay. Regular attendance is essential to succeed.

This is an introductory class, so it does not demand any previous knowledge of the subject.

Spring 2023-2024

The evaluation will be based upon a mid-term (30%) and a final exam (30%) to assess grasp of lecture and reading contents. The remaining 40% of the final grade will be based on an original research essay to be done in teams. This essay will consist of the historical analysis of one disaster of your choice, recent or old, applying the method and approach to disaster history developed in this course.

This course combines lectures and debates based on pre-circulated reading materials.