[Athena] Fwd: CFP on historical/contemporary studies of disasters

[Pierre Mounier <mounier AT msh-paris.fr>]

Chers Collègues,

Veuillez trouver ci-dessous un appel à communications sur le thème "Catastrophes", pour le prochain congrès de la SHOT à Copenhague en octobre prochain.

Cordialement,

Pierre Mounier-Kuhn

 

 

The Prometheans

SHOT’s Engineering Special Interest Group

SHOT Asia Network

Society for the History of Technology

 

Teach 3.11

A Project of the Forum for the History of Science in Asia

 

 

 

 

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

Historical and Contemporary Studies of Disasters
Placing Chernobyl, 9/11, Katrina, Deepwater Horizon, Fukushima
and Other Events in Historical and Comparative Perspective

 

Co-Sponsored by the

SHOT Prometheans (Engineering) SIG / SHOT Asia Network / Teach 3.11

and held during the

Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) Annual Meeting

Sunday, 7 October 2012

Copenhagen, Denmark

 

For this year’s Prometheans / SHOT Asia Network SIG workshop (with co-sponsorship from Teach 3.11, a project of the Forum for the History of Science in Asia), we would like to focus on historical and contemporary studies of both natural and anthropogenic disasters. Inspired by discussions about Fukushima and the greater East Japan Earthquake (Tohoku-chiho Taiheiyo Oki Shishin) and tsunami during the SHOT/4S/HSS co-located meeting in Cleveland last year, an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars from these three societies decided to create an open forum for academic discussions about disasters and the opportunity to place them in historical and comparative perspective. This year’s SIG session will be one gathering of this forum, with a focus on analyzing the sociotechnical dimensions of disasters from historical and other disciplinary perspectives.

This workshop will take place during the Sunday morning* special-interest-group (SIG) time slot at the SHOT annual meeting in Copenhagen. (*This event may be 1/2 day or full day depending on the level of interest.) Offered in an interactive workshop format, the event will be directed primarily towards historical and contemporary studies of disasters of different scales. A portion of the program may also be dedicated to interpreting the events surrounding the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the East Japan Earthquake through comparison with other disasters. While we anticipate that historians may comprise a significant portion of the membership because the event will take place at SHOT, scholars of all academic disciplines are invited to contribute and to attend.

 

Among the kinds of papers that we are interested in seeing are the following:

 

·         Historical or contemporary studies of any disaster of natural or anthropogenic origin. Especially papers that focus on the organizational, technological, and/or sociotechnical dimensions of the disaster, and how this contributed to or exacerbated a particular disaster or the responses that followed the disaster.

·         An examination of the cultural, political, or economic dimensions of a particular industry, such as nuclear energy, oil extraction, or civil engineering and construction, and their contributions to the disaster.

·         Historical and contemporary studies of environmental movements and environmental organizations and their relationship to disasters and disaster response.

·         Any comparative study of disasters, and specific dimensions of disasters.

 

The workshop format will consist of pre-circulated papers (1000-1800 words in length) and prepared responses; open discussions around predetermined themes during the workshop; and written responses and reflections submitted following the workshop. Members of the Prometheans, SHOT Asia Network, and Teach 3.11 will serve as the program committee for this event, and will work organize the papers received into coherent sessions. Works-in-progress, and submissions by graduate students as well as senior scholars, from any nation, are actively encouraged.

 

We ask those who are interested to signal your interest by sending us an email, with proposed title, at your earliest convenience so we are able to make an early decision about the scope of the workshop. The applications process will be open until June 1^st, by which point we will need a firm commitment to attend and a 300-word abstract from all participants. Pre-circulated papers will be due on September 1^st. Those presenting material during the main SHOT conference are still welcome to participate in the workshop with the same (or different) material, and are encouraged to do so (please indicate, for planning purposes, that this will be the case).

 

Please send emails signaling your interest with a proposed title for your paper to the SIG Workshop Program Committee chair, Atsushi Akera at akeraa AT rpi.edu.

 

(p.s. if you encounter problems with RPI’s spam filter, please send the message to my alternate email account:atsushi_akera AT hotmail.com, preferably with a quick note to this account indicating that you sent a message there since otherwise I don’t check that account regularly. – Thanks!)

 

_________________________________________________________

Atsushi Akera

Associate Professor, Department of Science and Technology Studies

Director, First Year Studies Program--Sage 5206

Rensselaer Polytechnic institute

110 8th Street

Troy, NY 12180  USA

ph: 518.279.9708/fx:518.276-2659/e:akeraa AT rpi.edu /w: http://www.rpi.edu/~akeraa

 

 

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