Science in the eye of the storm: A provincializing history of US-American "social science disaster research," 1949-1989

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Cécile Stehrenberger
• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 395788362

Initiated by Generals of the US-Army in 1949, the first so-called "social science disaster research group" was founded at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in Chicago. In 1952 and 1963, during two hot phases of the Cold War, similar groups were assembled at the National Research Council, at several universities, and at the Disaster Research Center of Ohio State University (DRC). Though initially multidisciplinary in nature, during the 1960s a specifically sociological perspective came to dominate this research. Its members - among them Enrico Quarantelli, Russle Dynes, and William Anderson - conducted several hundred field studies after earthquakes, factory explosions, as well as "racial riots" and simulated "organizational stress" in their laboratory. Up until today and across numerous scientific fields, their findings remain a highly important reference point for dealing with disaster, both academically and practically. At the same time, this history has gone almost completely unstudied. Following this research desideratum, the proposed project is set to answer the following research questions: What were the goals that different actors set when funding and engaging in disaster research? How did researchers advance the institutionalization of disaster research as a scientific field? How was the knowledge they generated actually used?The study's source material includes publications and archival documents from the US-American disaster research groups as well as publications from non-western, especially Indian and Mexican scientists. Its methodological approach consists of an historical epistemology that combines discourse analysis and praxeology. By analyzing its global entanglements, this project aims to provincialize US-American disaster research. The investigated period is framed by the foundation of the first research group, in 1949, and the Decline of the Cold War constellation, in 1989.The project will show how social science disaster research was shaped by and contributed to a specific Cold-War rationality of governing populations. Specifically, it will demonstrate how this rationality was characterized by an asymmetric circulation and loss of knowledge from the Global South. Such asymmetry, it will argue, has resulted in understandings, which still pervade today, of disaster as disruptive events. By historicizing social science disaster research, the project contributes, more broadly, to the historiography of both disaster sciences and Cold War social sciences and further promotes greater (self)-reflection of present-day dealings with disaster and social science research practices.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants