Rhetoric And Public Memory In The Science Of Disaster

Rhetoric and Public Memory in the Science of Disaster grapples with the role of science in the public memory of natural disasters. Taking a psychoanalytic and genealogical approach to the rhetoric of disaster science throughout the twentieth century, this book explores how we remember natural disasters by analyzing how we try to prevent them. Chapters track the development of predictive modeling methods alongside some of the worst and most consequential natural disasters in the history of the United States. From miniaturized physical scale models, to cartographic renderings within a burgeoning statistical science, to ever more complex simulation scenarios, disaster science has long created imaginary versions of horrific events in the effort to prevent them. Through an exploration of these hypothetical disasters, this book theorizes how science itself becomes a site of public memory, an increasingly important question in a world of changing weather.

Why is the past so dominant in the present? This book conceptualizes collective memory as currency, a medium of exchange, a system in common use, and one that is traded between and within nations. Bringing together contemporary case studies and multidisciplinary scholarship, this volume shows how past events are used and perceived as a commodity and a substantially fungible marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs, their supply or demand being a part of one universal market. This book provides readers with a broader understanding of the power of the past in the present. Specific past events are incarnated into collective memories that can transform into iconic, almost mythical stories that can be employed to help make sense of the present. Through evoking, constructing and reconstructing, selectively highlighting certain aspects or perspectives of prominent past events, these collective memories become a significant resource that actors and publics turn to in times of need. As currency, these memories provide a service. As currency, they can also relatively easily travel between collectives, since it is commonly understood that the past has value in the present, and that this value is similarly utilized in various countries around the world.

Using examples ranging from classical rhetoric to contemporary crises like 9/11, Public Forgetting demonstrates how communities may adopt idioms of forgetting in order to create new and beneficial standards of public judgment.

Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains central to personal, communal, and national identities. And although popular and public discourses from speeches to films invite a shared sense of the past, official sites of memory such as memorials, museums, and battlefields embody unique rhetorical principles. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside acci

When and under what circumstances are disaster survivors able to speak for themselves in the public arena? In Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative, author Kate Parker Horigan shows how the public understands and remembers large-scale disasters like Hurricane Katrina, outlining which stories are remembered and why, as well as the impact on public memory and the survivors themselves. Horigan discusses unique contexts in which personal narratives about the storm are shared, including interviews with survivors, Dave Eggers's Zeitoun, Josh Neufeld's A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water, and public commemoration during Hurricane Katrina's tenth anniversary in New Orleans. In each case, survivors initially present themselves in specific ways, counteracting negative stereotypes that characterize their communities. However, when adapted for public presentation, their stories get reduced back to those stereotypes. As a result, people affected by Katrina continue to be seen in limited terms, as either undeserving or incapable of managing recovery. This project is rooted in Horigan's experiences living in New Orleans before and after Katrina, but it is also a case study illustrating an ongoing problem and an innovative solution: survivors' stories should be shared in a way that includes their own engagement with the processes of narrative production, circulation, and reception. When survivors are seen as agents in their own stories, they will be seen as agents in their own recovery. Having a better grasp on the processes of narration and memory is critical for improved disaster response because the stories that are most widely shared about disaster determine how communities recover.

In early March of 2020, Americans watched with uncertain terror as the novel coronavirus pandemic unfolded. One week later, Ohio announced its first confirmed cases. Just one year later, the state had over a million cases and 18,000 Ohioans had died. What happened in that first pandemic year is not only a story of a public health disaster, but also a story of social disparities and moral dilemmas, of lives and livelihoods turned upside down, and of institutions and safety nets stretched to their limits. Ohio under COVID tells the human story of COVID in Ohio, America’s bellwether state. Scholars and practitioners examine the pandemic response from multiple angles, and contributors from numerous walks of life offer moving first-person reflections. Two themes emerge again and again: how the pandemic revealed a deep tension between individual autonomy and the collective good, and how it exacerbated social inequalities in a state divided along social, economic, and political lines. Chapters address topics such as mask mandates, ableism, prisons, food insecurity, access to reproductive health care, and the need for more Black doctors. The book concludes with an interview with Dr. Amy Acton, the state’s top public health official at the time COVID hit Ohio. Ohio under COVID captures the devastating impact of the pandemic, both in the public discord it has unearthed and in the unfair burdens it has placed on the groups least equipped to bear them.

It is widely assumed that humanity should be able to learn from calamities (e.g., emergencies, disasters, catastrophes) and that the affected individuals, groups, and enterprises, as well as the concerned (disaster-) management organizations and institutions for prevention and mitigation, will be able to be better prepared or more efficient next time. Furthermore, it is often assumed that the results of these learning processes are preserved as "knowledge" in the collective memory of a society, and that patterns of practices were adopted on this base. Within history, there is more evidence for the opposite: Analyzing past calamities reveals that there is hardly any learning and, if so, that it rarely lasts more than one or two generations. This book explores whether learning in the context of calamities happens at all, and if learning takes place, under which conditions it can be achieved and what would be required to ensure that learned cognitive and practical knowledge will endure on a societal level. The contributions of this book include various fields of scientific research: history, sociology, geography, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, development studies and political studies, as well as disaster research and disaster risk reduction research.

Disasters such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina illustrate the salience and complexity of disasters. Both scholars and practitioners therefore agree that we must take a more proactive and holistic approach to emergency management, which should logically be derived from a sound understanding of the academic literature and the most pressing concerns facing professionals in the field today. Disciplines, Disasters and Emergency Management reviews what is known about catastrophic events from the standpoint of various academic areas of study. The introductory chapter by the editor, David A. McEntire, discusses the importance of and difficulties associated with multi- and interdisciplinary research on disasters and emergency management. Well-known scholars such as Drabek, Gibbs, Pine, Scanlon, Sylves, Waugh, Zakour and others then join efforts with budding students who have recently been exposed to the disaster management profession. Their review of our current level of knowledge represents 23 disciplines including geography, engineering, sociology, gerontology, public administration, international relations, law, environmental management, criminal justice, and information science, etc. The concluding chapter summarizes the contributions of various disciplines, identifies potential research opportunities, and describes ways to address future disaster problems. Besides comparing the similarities and differences among the findings from diverse fields of study, Disciplines, Disasters and Emergency Management suggests that scholars may increase their comprehension of disasters by focusing attention on the unique concept of vulnerability. Recommendations for disaster reduction also make this a useful book for professionals in emergency management. Whether you are a seasoned expert in disaster research or a novice in emergency management, this book will help you acquire cutting-edge knowledge about disasters and emergency management.

Rhetorical analyses of collective memory study how perceptions of a shared past are maintained through public texts. This analysis explores an alternative relationship between rhetoric and remembrance. Rather than study the textual form of public memory alone, I argue that communities actively interpret artifacts of public discourse as public memory. The most enduring form of this practice is ceremonial repetition, or the deliberate recitation of a text during moments of communal observance. When performed effectively, ceremonial repetition imagines a text by highlighting a resonant virtue through public reading. Such strategies to mold the meaning of a text occur through a variety of messages adjoining recitation, such as formal speech, visual display, written testament, or spatial and bodily enactment. Ceremonial repetition illustrates the extensional evolution and legacy of speech in the public imagination. In a range of historically grounded case studies, this work explores the effectiveness and dominant strategies of ceremonial repetition different eras of American public discourse. These examples include the rhetorical invocation of a text within the discursive space of repetition, illustrated in Frederick Douglass's August First orations on the Emancipation Proclamation in the late nineteenth-century; the pairing of visual icons and ceremonial repetition, as exemplified in official and public readings of George Washington's Farewell Address within the context of a political flag display during the Civil War; the disjunction of repetition and written reflection, as evidenced by the U.S. Senate's institutional recitation of the Farewell Address on Washington's birthday; and the emerging genre of repetition performed through multiple voices and resonant scenery, as clarified in a variety of modern performances, such as the reading of the "I Have a Dream" speech by elementary school students celebrating the King holiday. These case studies illuminate various strategies used to translate past words by constraining their meaning for the needs of the present. Though ceremonial repetition offers audiences the opportunity to reconstitute a text's properties and public legacy, this study concludes that such epideictic practice is most effective during moments of perceived crisis wherein core tenets of a political culture are profoundly questioned or disrupted. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/149352