Book Chats—Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, The Government of Emergency
Levan Institute for the Humanities Book Chats—Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security
April 8, 2022
A discussion of Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff's new book, The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (Princeton University Press, 2021). The authors will be joined in conversation by Rebecca Lemov (Harvard University) and Sven Opitz (Philipps University of Marburg), moderated by Andrea Ballestero (USC). Co-sponsored by the USC Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life.
About the Book: From pandemic disease, to the disasters associated with global warming, to cyberattacks, today we face an increasing array of catastrophic threats. It is striking that, despite the diversity of these threats, experts and officials approach them in common terms: as future events that threaten to disrupt the vital, vulnerable systems upon which modern life depends.
The Government of Emergency tells the story of how this now taken-for-granted way of understanding and managing emergencies arose. Amid the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of experts and officials working in obscure government offices developed a new understanding of the nation as a complex of vital, vulnerable systems. They invented technical and administrative devices to mitigate the nation’s vulnerability, and organized a distinctive form of emergency government that would make it possible to prepare for and manage potentially catastrophic events.
Through these conceptual and technical inventions, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff argue, vulnerability was defined as a particular kind of problem, one that continues to structure the approach of experts, officials, and policymakers to future emergencies.
About the Authors: Stephen Collier is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California Berkeley. He studies city planning and urban governance from the broad perspective of the critical social science of expertise and expert systems. His work addresses a range of topics, including climate resilience and adaptation, emergency preparedness and emergency management, neoliberal reform, infrastructure, and urban social welfare.
Andrew Lakoff is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. His areas of interest include science and technology studies, biopolitics, risk society, and the history of the human sciences. He has conducted research in Argentina, France, and the United States. Lakoff's previous books include Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (2006) and Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency (2017).
Open to attendants outside of USC. An excerpt of the book will be made available to registered attendants. Registration before the event is required.
This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities' “Book Chats” series, conversations about new books published by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. To see more events in this series, including recordings of past events, visit https://dornsife.usc.edu/levan-instit....