Disasters: Aftermath and Legacy

Disasters and their aftermaths can expose physical areas, social processes, and mental worlds that we tend not to see in day-to-day life. This course examines how disasters in the modern world are historicised, memorialised and remembered, and how these processes have influenced understandings of risk, vulnerability, and social and environmental justice. Working across diverse case studies, including nuclear tests, political unrest, and industrial disease, this course considers a diverse range of historical evidence to assess the ways in which understandings of disaster have been shaped and contested through collective memory and memorialisation. Through an examination of museum exhibitions, government inquiries and policies, public ceremony and commemoration, popular culture, and risk assessments, we will examine how the memory and representation of disasters have been debated and transformed. As extreme weather events become more frequent and intense with questions of accountability, mitigation, and adaptation, this course will encourage reflection on the contested meanings of 'disaster' in framing what and who is remembered, and the legacies that are forged in their aftermath.