Classroom
Cataclysmic Class
In what seems like a flood of bad news, are there lessons to learn?
It is unnervingly easy to think that we live in an age of catastrophe. Terrorism is epidemic. A hurricane batters and drowns an iconic American city, and nearly two thousand people die. Withering heat waves in Europe and the United States roast the vulnerable by the thousands. A tsunami washes entire villages in Sumatra, Thailand, and Sri Lanka out to sea. Earthquakes rattle our sense of security. Wildfire, again and again, singes the margins of exurbia.
But we’re not special. Disaster, of course, is a hallmark of history. As long as humans have lived together, disease, natural hazards, and cataclysms inspired directly and indirectly by people have left death, destruction, and misery as their calling cards. Often, in fact, disaster becomes a defining event for a place in time. Think Pompeii, for one famous example, or San Francisco, and now New Orleans.
But what do we learn from calamity? Or perhaps the better question, given the human penchant for squatting squarely in its path, is do we learn anything at all?
“People have been studying disasters since there have been disasters,” says Rick Keller, a UW-Madison professor of medical history. “The approach is usually pretty clinical, but one of the things that’s changed in recent years is a growing interest in the social dimensions of disasters.”
It is unnervingly easy to think that we live in an age of catastrophe. Terrorism is epidemic. A hurricane batters and drowns an iconic American city, and nearly two thousand people die. Withering heat waves in Europe and the United States roast the vulnerable by the thousands. A tsunami washes entire villages in Sumatra, Thailand, and Sri Lanka out to sea. Earthquakes rattle our sense of security. Wildfire, again and again, singes the margins of exurbia.
But we’re not special. Disaster, of course, is a hallmark of history. As long as humans have lived together, disease, natural hazards, and cataclysms inspired directly and indirectly by people have left death, destruction, and misery as their calling cards. Often, in fact, disaster becomes a defining event for a place in time. Think Pompeii, for one famous example, or San Francisco, and now New Orleans.
But what do we learn from calamity? Or perhaps the better question, given the human penchant for squatting squarely in its path, is do we learn anything at all?
“People have been studying disasters since there have been disasters,” says Rick Keller, a UW-Madison professor of medical history. “The approach is usually pretty clinical, but one of the things that’s changed in recent years is a growing interest in the social dimensions of disasters.”
After all, Keller asks, can you have a catastrophe if a hurricane lands where there are no people or if a volcano blows its top when nobody’s around? The disaster equation, it seems, requires the human variable.
To put calamitous events and their social implications under the microscope, Keller this semester is teaching Medical History 919, a graduate seminar titled Disaster and Catastrophe in the Modern World. The course is an exploration of the intersection of humans, nature, and disaster. The menu of events parsed by Keller and his intimate gathering of students in a cramped Medical Science Center reading room ranges from the heart-wrenching to the tragically ridiculous.
Consider, for example, the “Morton Salt Disaster,” a South Dakota cloud-seeding foray that some think may have contributed to a fifteen-inch rainfall during six hours in the eastern Black Hills in June 1972. The resulting flash floods in Rapid City left 238 people dead and injured more than 3,000 others. Naturally, no one could pin the blame on the rainmakers and their loads of finely ground salt — used, in theory and parched hope, as a nucleating catalyst for raindrops.
Many cataclysmic events, of course, are triggered by nature. Tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes are beyond the inspirational capacity of humans. But people, it seems, have a terrific knack for being in the right place at the wrong time.
To put calamitous events and their social implications under the microscope, Keller this semester is teaching Medical History 919, a graduate seminar titled Disaster and Catastrophe in the Modern World. The course is an exploration of the intersection of humans, nature, and disaster. The menu of events parsed by Keller and his intimate gathering of students in a cramped Medical Science Center reading room ranges from the heart-wrenching to the tragically ridiculous.
Consider, for example, the “Morton Salt Disaster,” a South Dakota cloud-seeding foray that some think may have contributed to a fifteen-inch rainfall during six hours in the eastern Black Hills in June 1972. The resulting flash floods in Rapid City left 238 people dead and injured more than 3,000 others. Naturally, no one could pin the blame on the rainmakers and their loads of finely ground salt — used, in theory and parched hope, as a nucleating catalyst for raindrops.
Many cataclysmic events, of course, are triggered by nature. Tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes are beyond the inspirational capacity of humans. But people, it seems, have a terrific knack for being in the right place at the wrong time.
And sometimes, come hell or high water, our species insists on staying there. Take Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New Orleans. If seismic, meteorological, or hydrologic considerations are taken into serious account, logic dictates you build (or rebuild) somewhere else. “These places weren’t born risky,” explains historian Ted Steinberg in Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, one of the texts for the course. “They were built that way.”
The developers of Miami in its art deco heyday, for instance, couldn’t let a 1926 hurricane dampen enthusiasm for a city built on sand. As developers and their allies, notably the young Miami Herald, sought to buffer the burgeoning city’s waterlogged image, if not its vulnerability to monster storms, they downplayed the 115 left dead and 15,000 made homeless by the storm. In San Francisco in 1906, civic boosters airbrushed postcards to erase evidence of earthquake damage.
“We live in a society that thinks it has some control over nature,” Keller explains. “But nature bites back sometimes, and efforts to rewrite history are another chance to put nature back in its box and claim all is well.”
The seminar, on a trial run and possibly the basis for a permanent course or undergraduate offering, grew out of Keller’s research interests. With help from the UW-Madison Graduate School, the National Science Foundation, and the city of Paris, Keller is documenting the social dimensions of the deadly 2003 heat wave, when a tropical air mass from Africa parked itself over Europe for three weeks in August and killed thousands. “It brought with it staggering mortality. Fifteen thousand people in France alone died,” Keller notes.
The most vulnerable were elderly women who died in their homes. These victims, he says, were the socially isolated of France: “They lived completely alone and they died completely alone.”
The developers of Miami in its art deco heyday, for instance, couldn’t let a 1926 hurricane dampen enthusiasm for a city built on sand. As developers and their allies, notably the young Miami Herald, sought to buffer the burgeoning city’s waterlogged image, if not its vulnerability to monster storms, they downplayed the 115 left dead and 15,000 made homeless by the storm. In San Francisco in 1906, civic boosters airbrushed postcards to erase evidence of earthquake damage.
“We live in a society that thinks it has some control over nature,” Keller explains. “But nature bites back sometimes, and efforts to rewrite history are another chance to put nature back in its box and claim all is well.”
The seminar, on a trial run and possibly the basis for a permanent course or undergraduate offering, grew out of Keller’s research interests. With help from the UW-Madison Graduate School, the National Science Foundation, and the city of Paris, Keller is documenting the social dimensions of the deadly 2003 heat wave, when a tropical air mass from Africa parked itself over Europe for three weeks in August and killed thousands. “It brought with it staggering mortality. Fifteen thousand people in France alone died,” Keller notes.
The most vulnerable were elderly women who died in their homes. These victims, he says, were the socially isolated of France: “They lived completely alone and they died completely alone.”
In contrast, the majority of victims of a sizzling heat wave that struck the American Midwest in 1995 were aged African-American men. The eight hundred victims in Chicago and Milwaukee lived in high-crime areas. “They were also socially isolated. They were afraid to go out,” Keller says.
Exploring such tragedies, he argues, does flesh out the human side of catastrophe and offers lessons for how to minimize or mitigate the toll. New Orleans, he notes, has become a critical laboratory for understanding disaster, as an army of sociologists, supported by a nimble and forward-thinking National Science Foundation, descended on the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The vast majority of the storm’s victims were poor blacks, people living in the most vulnerable place in the city with no way out. “The Lower Ninth Ward is the lowest spot in New Orleans. One-quarter of the population didn’t have access to cars. That’s a social problem, an economic problem,” Keller says.
New Orleans is a special case in several respects. The city is essential to the economic vitality of the entire country. “There has to be a port there,” he says. “It’s an absolutely critical component of the American economy.”
But in the devastation left in the wake of Katrina’s surge and other natural catastrophes come opportunities to understand the human tendencies that transform a phenomenon of nature into a disaster.
“These are the things this course is looking at — the human and social dimensions of disaster,” Keller says. “We need to figure out how we can make a difference.”
— Terry Devitt ’78, MA’85
Exploring such tragedies, he argues, does flesh out the human side of catastrophe and offers lessons for how to minimize or mitigate the toll. New Orleans, he notes, has become a critical laboratory for understanding disaster, as an army of sociologists, supported by a nimble and forward-thinking National Science Foundation, descended on the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The vast majority of the storm’s victims were poor blacks, people living in the most vulnerable place in the city with no way out. “The Lower Ninth Ward is the lowest spot in New Orleans. One-quarter of the population didn’t have access to cars. That’s a social problem, an economic problem,” Keller says.
New Orleans is a special case in several respects. The city is essential to the economic vitality of the entire country. “There has to be a port there,” he says. “It’s an absolutely critical component of the American economy.”
But in the devastation left in the wake of Katrina’s surge and other natural catastrophes come opportunities to understand the human tendencies that transform a phenomenon of nature into a disaster.
“These are the things this course is looking at — the human and social dimensions of disaster,” Keller says. “We need to figure out how we can make a difference.”
— Terry Devitt ’78, MA’85
On the Tip of My Tongue
Environment, Textiles, and Design 642: Taste
We’ve been told since time immemorial that there’s no accounting for taste, but if you believe that, then you haven’t met Preeti Chopra. An assistant professor in the visual cultures cluster, Chopra insists that everyone makes judgments about taste — good, bad, high, low — and she’s created a course to account for what such descriptions mean about us as a society.
“Taste may originally have meant merely a description of something as sweet or salty,” she says, “but since the seventeenth century, it’s also been used in a social context as a way of establishing hierarchies.” The differences that divide good taste from bad, or high culture from low, or even beautiful from ugly may seem like matters of aesthetics, but they’re also matters of social distinction.
Chopra created her taste course in fall 2004 to help students examine the role of taste sociologically, anthropologically, and politically. A small seminar, with typically around a dozen undergraduate and graduate students, the elective covers a broad range of culture, including architecture, landscape, visual art, and fashion, spanning time from the Victorian age to the present.
The goal, according to Chopra, isn’t for her students to learn the difference between good taste and bad, but rather why and how we make such judgments, sometimes revealing unknown prejudices. “A lot of what we talk about can make people uneasy,” she says. “But that’s how they learn to have a greater awareness of the world they live in.”
— John Allen
We’ve been told since time immemorial that there’s no accounting for taste, but if you believe that, then you haven’t met Preeti Chopra. An assistant professor in the visual cultures cluster, Chopra insists that everyone makes judgments about taste — good, bad, high, low — and she’s created a course to account for what such descriptions mean about us as a society.
“Taste may originally have meant merely a description of something as sweet or salty,” she says, “but since the seventeenth century, it’s also been used in a social context as a way of establishing hierarchies.” The differences that divide good taste from bad, or high culture from low, or even beautiful from ugly may seem like matters of aesthetics, but they’re also matters of social distinction.
Chopra created her taste course in fall 2004 to help students examine the role of taste sociologically, anthropologically, and politically. A small seminar, with typically around a dozen undergraduate and graduate students, the elective covers a broad range of culture, including architecture, landscape, visual art, and fashion, spanning time from the Victorian age to the present.
The goal, according to Chopra, isn’t for her students to learn the difference between good taste and bad, but rather why and how we make such judgments, sometimes revealing unknown prejudices. “A lot of what we talk about can make people uneasy,” she says. “But that’s how they learn to have a greater awareness of the world they live in.”
— John Allen
