Unnatural Disasters: Rethinking Histories of Catastrophe in the Americas

Catalog description

Since Hurricane Katrina, the history of natural disasters and the new interdisciplinary field of critical disaster studies have surfaced. Both fields of agree that natural disasters are windows onto the societies they strike and are processes emerging from historical human and nonhuman causes. Natural disasters, they agree, are unnatural. Studying a range of environmental processes from melting glaciers in the Andes to radioactive pollution west of Rockies, this course adopts a hemispheric scope to connect geographical, temporal, and thematic fields of history. We will think together about the agency of American environments and the hazards that haunt them. We draw on diverse methods to examine the roles that race, power, indigeneity, disability, gender, and science play in the history of (un)natural disasters. These methods will help us analyze primary sources while also encouraging curiosity for overlooked American communities and environments.