The Need to See and the Will not to Know - How we deal with catastrophes

Discussion

With: Craig Calhoun, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Eric Klinenberg, Michel Lussault, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Patrick Savidan
Co-presented with The Institute for Public Knowledge

Craig Calhoun has served as the president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) since 1999. He also holds the title of University Professor of the Social Sciences at New York University and is the founding director of NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge. Under Calhoun's leadership, the SSRC has initiated major projects on, among others, the public communication of social science knowledge, the privatization of risk, religion and the public sphere, HIV/AIDS, media reform and new communications technologies, transformations in knowledge production, and questions of how to assess and evaluate efforts to shape social change. As an individual scholar, Calhoun has written on culture and communication, technology and social change, social theory and politics, and on the social sciences themselves. His most recent books include Cosmopolitanism and Belonging (Routledge, forthcoming 2011), and Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (Routledge, 2007), and the University of Chicago Press is publishing a collection of his historical essays, entitled The Roots of Radicalism. Calhoun recently edited two noteworthy collections: Sociology in America (Chicago, 2007) and Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power, with F. Cooper and K. Moore (New Press, 2006). Throughout his career, Calhoun has been involved in projects bringing social science to bear on issues of public concern. These have ranged from consulting on rural education and development in North Carolina, to advising the Constitutional Commission of Eritrea, to helping develop communications infrastructure in Sudan. Most famously, he provided a detailed eyewitness accountand award-winning sociological analysisof the student revolt in Tiananmen Square, in his most popular work to date, Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (California, 1994). Calhoun received his doctorate from Oxford University. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 19 years, where he also served as dean of the Graduate School and director of the University Center for International Studies. He has been a visiting professor in China, Eritrea, France, Norway, and Sudan.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, polytechnicien et ingénieur des mines, est professeur à l'Université de Stanford. Il a enseigné longtemps la philosophie sociale et politique et l'éthique des sciences et des techniques à l'École polytechnique, où il a fondé le CRÉA (Centre de recherche en épistémologie appliquée) et dirige le Groupe d'intervention sur la science et l'éthique (GRISÉ). Il a récemment été élu à l'Académie Française des Technologies.

Eric Klinenberg is Professor of Sociology at New York University, and editor of the journal Public Culture. His first book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, won six scholarly and literary prizes (as well as a Favorite Book section from the Chicago Tribune) and was praised as a dense and subtle portrait (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker); a remarkable, riveting account (American Prospect); intellectually exciting (Amartya Sen); and a trenchant, persuasive tale of slow murder by public policy (Salon). A theatrical adaptation of Heat Wave premiered in Chicago in 2008, and a feature documentary based on the book is currently in production. Klinenberg's second book, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media, was called politically passionate and intellectually serious, (Columbia Journalism Review), a must-read for those who wonder what happened to good radio, accurate reporting and autonomous public interest (Time Out New York), and eye-opening ...required reading for conscientious citizens (Kirkus). Since its publication, he has testified before the Federal Communications Commission and briefed the U.S. Congress on his findings. Klinenberg is currently working on two new projects. One, a study of the problem of urban security, examines the rise of disaster expertise, the range of policy responses to emerging concerns about urban risk and vulnerability, and the challenge of cultivating a culture of preparedness. The other project is a multi-year study of the extraordinary rise in living alone. He reported on parts of this research in a recent story for NPR's This American Life, and is now working on a book, Alone in America, which will be published by The Penguin Press. In addition to his books and scholarly articles, Klinenberg writes for popular publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Slate.

Michel Lussault est géographe, professeur des Universités à l'Université de Lyon (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon). Auteur de nombreux ouvrages et contributions scientifiques, il a notamment publié De la lutte des classes à la lutte des places (Grasset, 2009). Il développe dans ses travaux une approche originale de l'action spatiale des opérateurs sociaux en insistant notammentsur l'identification de compétences élémentaires de la spatialité.

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. His research is in the general field of visual culture. In the past few years, he has concentrated in different areas. He is interested in a decolonial genealogy of visuality, a key term of art for the field, which owes its existence to the practice of Naopleonic-era generals in visualizing a battlefield that they could not see. Visuality imagined the social as war and was opposed to all emancipations and liberations. Visual culture is, therefore, against visuality. His book The Right to Look : A Counterhistory of Visuality is forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2011. He also works on texts for general academic use in the field, such as An Introduction to Visual Culture (2nd ed. 2009) and The Visual Culture Reader (3rd ed. forthcoming 2012). Moreover, he works extensively with contemporary artists, most recently with Carl Pope and Jeremy Deller. He is a contributing editor for the online project Media Commons and a co PI with the Melllon-funded Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, which is developing Scalar, a multi-media born-digital authoring software, Finally, he is currently working on a project on the visual culture of climate change in conjunction with the not-for-profit Islands First.

Cette ressource a été publiée dans le cadre de la troisième saison du festival "Walls and Bridges" qui s'est déroulée du 19 au 28 octobre 2011 à New York.

Pour citer cette ressource :

Craig Calhoun, Dupuy Jean-Pierre, Klinenberg Eric, Michel Lussault, Mirzoeff Nicholas, Patrick Savidan, "The Need to See and the Will not to Know - How we deal with catastrophes ", La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), janvier 2012. Consulté le 25/04/2024. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/litterature/entretiens-et-textes-inedits/the-need-to-see-and-the-will-not-to-know-how-we-deal-with-catastrophes