Disasters as Suffering Out of Place: Introducing Critical Disaster Studies RSVP

Tuesday, October 12th, 2021 at 6 PM in 909 Renaissance Park
Talk description:

The emerging interdisciplinary field of critical disaster studies takes as a starting point that considering something a disaster is a subjective and political decision: a designation that some suffering is acceptable and normal, and other suffering is unacceptable and abnormal. Critical disaster studies also works to understand disaster as embedded in multiple and overlapping chronologies, including that people’s experiences and understandings of disasters are shaped by their anticipation and imagination of disaster before it occurs. This talk explores the themes of critical disaster studies and explains how it should shape the study of and response to disaster.

Jacob Remes is Clinical Associate Professor of History in New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he directs the Initiative for Critical Disaster Studies. Trained as a labor and working-class historian of the United States and Canada, he is the co-editor, with Andy Horowitz, of Critical Disaster Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and author of Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (University of Illinois Press, 2016).