Race, Nature, and Disaster

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary course examines the intersections of race, politics, and environmental and biological disaster. We will look at how ideas about race in the U.S. have shaped and been shaped by social policy, global politics and economics, and U.S. foreign policy, and investigate how certain populations within and outside the U.S. become disproportionately vulnerable to wide-scale disaster. Readings and discussions focus on the human-made dimensions of biological disasters, such as typhus, the bubonic plague, HIV/AIDS, the cholera outbreak in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, and the current COVID-19 crisis. In thinking about how vulnerability is created and maintained according to a racial logic, we will interrogate the following questions: How is the construct of “nature” framed in opposition to “humanity”? How do claims to objective knowledge about nature operate in political realms? In what ways has the nature/humanity binary informed the construction of racial categories and racism? How do ideas of nature serve to obscure the complex intersections of environmental and social factors in our daily realities? How do discussions of crisis and disaster (in other words, exceptional situations) serve to authorize extreme measures? How do certain versions of international humanitarianism deny the global interconnectedness of nation-states and the culpability of those giving aid in the dire circumstances of those receiving it?