Comparative Accounts of Catastrophes, Collapses, and Chronic Failures

Economic collapses, natural disasters, human rights abuses, genocides, extreme hunger and suffering, political devolutions, environmental crises — these failures, hazards, crises, and disasters, whether acute or chronic, are endemic to our globalizing world. Modern bureaucratic organizations produce documents and plans that identify problems and propose solutions. These highly instrumental documents are, we argue, embedded in cultural assumptions and narratives – in a modern social imaginary. Participants will identify several global governance texts such as the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG), Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, documents surrounding the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and UNESCO World Heritage documents. Humanities scholars working in other historical civilizations will identify texts in those traditions that might be comparable – working through what comparable means is part of our work. Currently this includes Medieval France / Western Europe, Enlightenment Europe (e.g., texts surrounding the Lisbon earthquake of 1755), and China (early Ming and possibly Qing Dynasties). We will read each text for how it constitutes, narrates, interprets, and accounts for acute, episodic catastrophes, disasters, and suffering and also chronic suffering, injustice, conflict, and evil. The resulting interpretive process will be a conversation among texts and interpretations of texts across civilizations, organized around language and rhetorical styles and ontological frames. The faculty cluster thus will use humanist interpretation of texts to interpret the core technical rationality within which international organizations operate and to develop an interdisciplinary, comparative analytic framework. The faculty cluster will also explore parallel interpretive readings of visual images and built-environments. For contemporary global institutions, we will examine the images included in texts and websites, and we will study UNESCO World heritage sites.