Inside Duke Medicine

Next Provost Lecture, Nov. 18

The Provost Lecture Series features related lectures on a topic of major campus and broader societal importance.

The next lecture on Nov. 18 features Kevin Rozario, associate professor of American Studies at Smith College. He will be discussing Catastrophes Of Progress: Disaster And Innovation In America.

Kevin Rozario
Associate Professor of American Studies, Smith College

November 18, 2010
5:00-6:30 p.m.
Sociology-Psychology Building
Room 130, Zener Auditorium

Catastrophes Of Progress: Disaster And Innovation In America

This lecture analyzes the close, perhaps co-dependent, relationship between disasters and innovation - political, economic, technological, and cultural – in American history. Arguing that American notions of progress have emerged paradoxically out of encounters with disasters, to the point that destruction features in dominant ideologies as an instrument of renewal, an agent of reform, as the mother of invention (from capitalist theories of creative destruction to the Protestant refrain that adversity brings out the best in us), the lecture examines the proposition that recent experiences with Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, and the BP oil spill, have finally ruptured the relationship between calamity and progress. Disaster still figures as opportunity (the premise of Naomi Klein’s provocative work on “disaster capitalism” is that there is money, and political advantage, to be made from chaos), but disasters more often now seem to advertise the shortcomings than the resilience and resourcefulness of customary business and development practices, raising critical questions about the meaning and function of disasters in our turbulent and anxious times.

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