Risk Cultures: Pandemic Politics, Natural Disasters and Nuclear Energy - 13224 - SOC 2130 - 770 |
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CL: ASST 2000 (771). Notes: The Monday and Wednesday meetings for this class will be held in person; Friday meetings will be conducted online. Topical Course description: As a global viral pandemic is transforming the world, the ways in which cultures institutionalize what constitutes acceptable parameters of risk has become increasingly evident. The COVID-19 pandemic is a transformative crisis, but it is only one instance of a larger process of how we calibrate perceived threat and attempt to impose a sense of normalcy in an increasingly precarious world. In Japan this was especially evident in the Tohoku disasters of 2011, when the largest earthquake ever recorded in Japan, a tsunami that took almost 20,000 lives and 3 nuclear reactors in meltdown in the Fukushima nuclear crisis grew to become the most expensive conjoined disasters in world history. This course examines major disasters such as the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima nuclear accidents, global climate change and its associated effects (the Katrina Hurricane in New Orleans, flooding, wildfires, impact on vulnerable populations) and episodic but impactful disasters such as the Challenger Space Shuttle Explosion and the British Petroleum Deep Water Horizon oil spill as case studies to illustrate how risk is socially constructed and politically contended, and makes its way through public policy into institutional structures to profoundly affect our lives.
Associated Term: 2024 Summer I Registration Dates: Mar 24, 2024 to May 30, 2024 Registration Levels: Graduate, NonDegree Continuing Undergrad, Undergraduate Japan Campus Base Lecture Schedule Type Mix of In-person and Online Instructional Method Credit Hours: 3.000 Seats Available: 31 |