Governing Disaster

Catalog description

How do governments maintain their power in a world of accelerating disasters, from floods and droughts to heat waves and pandemics? To answer this question, the course examines the mutual constitution of modern government and disasters: how governments produce ostensibly “natural” disasters and how such disasters, in turn, legitimate the powers of government –especially forms of technocratic and authoritarian rule. It traces the governmental, technological, and scientific techniques through which environmental hazards are not only reconfigured to protect certain populations over others, but also how certain hazards become knowable and visible as a “disaster,” while others are made unknowable, invisible, or routine in the interests of maintaining governmental power.