CIAO DATE: 01/2012
September 2011
The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs
This paper explores “system vulnerability thinking” as a specific response to the exigencies of thermonuclear war in the 1950s. It is one part of a collaborative project with Andrew Lakoff on the government of catastrophe in the post-World War II United States. The project focuses on the forms of expertise, the knowledge practices, and the governmental institutions that have been invented to anticipate and manage potential catastrophes, from natural disasters, to pandemic disease, to terrorism, to energy crises. In this project we have identified the reconfiguration of US government in the early years of the Cold War as a crucial moment in which the government of catastrophe in the post-World War II US took shape.
Resource link: The Political Ontology of Catastrophe: Inventing the Vulnerable Society, 1953-1958 [PDF] - 1.5M