Making Threats:

Risk and the Production of Environmental Anxieties

An Interdisciplinary Colloquium at Sarah Lawrence College

Co-sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program & the Science, Technology, and Society Program

For more information on any of the talks, please call or e-mail SLC College Events (grantg@slc.edu or 914-395-2412)

Speaker Schedule (Fall 20003 – Spring 2004)

BANU SUBRAMANIAM Friday October 3^rd, 2003

Titsworth Lecture Hall 12:30-1:45PM

Alien Nation: Natives and Aliens in the Age of Globalization

Abstract: Over the last few decades, there has been a recent surge of interest in biological invasions the Entry and establishment of alien/foreign/exotic plants and animals in the United States. Ecologists, conservation biologists, and policy experts are currently actively shaping national policies on plant and animal movements. Using the case study of biological invasions, I examine the need to reject the binaries of nature/culture to develop a reflexive interdisciplinary practice that engages the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. In exploring contemporary discourse on biological invasion, I suggest that the language of exotic/alien plant and animal invasions reflect a pervasive nativism; a nativism that blames the alien, and foreign for the changing U. S. landscape. I elaborate the many parallels between the rhetoric surrounding foreign plants and animals and those of humans. I also present results from recent experiments testing theories on native and exotics. The talk traces the interconnections between scientific theories and rhetoric with changing cultural and political conceptions of human immigration/foreigners and the importance of developing a progressive practice that recognizes the complexities of our interconected world.

An assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Subramaniam’s primary research interests are in the relationships between gender, race, colonialism and science. Primarily trained as a biologist, she is interested in building bridges between the natural sciences and the social sciences and the humanities. Her current aim is to develop a "reconstructive" project for feminism and science. Woven across many disciplines and interdisciplines, her work seeks to reconnect the worlds of "natures" and "cultures." By bringing together scholarship from women's studies, biological sciences, science studies, postcolonial studies, and ethnic studies, she is attempting to develop innovative academic

practices, informed and shaped by experimental practice in the sciences, and feminist scholarship from the humanities and social sciences. She is the co-author of “Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation”(Routledge 2001), and author of many articles, including “Global Circulations: Nature, Culture and the Possibility of Sustainable Development."

RONNIE D. LIPSCHUTZ November 7, 2003

Titsworth Lecture Hall 12:30-1:45PM

Presenting “Duct Tape or Plastic? The Political Economy of Threats and the Production of Fear.”

Abstract: Fear is not, contrary to Thomas Hobbes, inherent to human nature. Fear must be taught, it must be learned, it must be produced. How else are we to know who is friend and who is foe, whom we are and are not? Still, the production of fear is no easy matter, and on it rests much more than individual survival. On fear rests authority. On fear rests economy. On fear rests power.

This presentation explores how fear is produced through a political economy of threats and sold to the American public. We do not contend that there are no hazards in life, some of them quite deadly, or that people’s malevolent feelings and intentions are imaginary. We do claim, however, that threats have neither content nor significance until they are invested with meaning that draws on both the familiar and the alien. There are many threats, but turning them into a fear that can be consumed amounts to more than dissemination of “intelligence” or a calculation of risk. We propose that, only through a careful examination of the ways language, social relations, and material things are combined into a finished package of danger can the production of fear be understood not as warning but as the creation of terrified and terrorized populations seeking protection from the very state that produces those fears. We illustrate our arguments through an analysis of the “Code Orange” terror alert called by the Bush Administration in February, 2003.

Ronnie D. Lipschutz is Professor of Politics and Associate Director of the Center for Global, International and Regional Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is also Chair of the Politics Ph.D. program at UCSC. His primary areas of research and teaching include international politics, global environmental affairs, U.S. foreign policy, globalization, international regulation, and film, fiction, and politics. Lipschutz has published and lectured widely on these topics. His most recent books include Global Environmental Politics: Power, Perspectives and Practice (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2004), After Authority—War, Peace and Global Politics in the 21^st Century (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000) and Cold War Fantasies—Film, Fiction and Foreign Policy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). He is co-authoring a text with Mary Ann Tetreault, Global Politics Because People Matter, which Rowman and Littlefield hopes to publish someday. He is also the author of When Nations Clash: Raw Materials, Ideology and Foreign Policy (New York: Ballinger/Harper and Row, 1989) and Global Civil Society and Global Environmental Governance (Albany: SUNY Press), editor of On Security (New York: Columbia, 1995), and co-author or co-editor of several other books.

JEANNE GUILLEMAN Friday December 5^th, 2003

Titsworth Lecture Hall 12:30-1:45PM

Embedded Terrorism: Political Determinants of Bioterrorism and Global Epidemics

Abstract: Outbreaks of life-threatening infectious diseases and the dangers of biological weapons are conventionally dichotomized into categories of "natural" and "intentional" epidemics. Yet both have common structural causes which I have described as "embedded terrorism." Paul Farmer and others have delineated the political determinants of major global epidemics which perpetuate the social control of disadvantaged populations. Secret state biological warfare programs have also relied on ignorance and repression to strategically target civilian populations with lethal diseases. The "process of terrorism," as defined by E.V. Walter, structures relations between 1) expendable populations, whose loss is not only tolerable but may augment existing power structures, and 2) target populations, whose behavioral submission sustains political order. Sudden, uncontrollable loss of life from a political source need only be threatened to subdue target populations. New US government programs to counter potential bioterrorism attacks by foreign aggressors demonstrate the "fright value" of epidemic disease for producing fear and expanding target populations on the basis of imagined, politically-driven simulations of national devastation--which in their apocalyptic vision strip the present of social meaning. At the same time, poverty, lack of education, and global economic forces increase the numbers of those perceived by international powers as expendable populations. Case analyses of the 1972 smallpox outbreak in Yugoslavia, the 1979 anthrax epidemic in Sverdlovsk (USSR), and the 2001 US anthrax postal attacks show that the false dichotomy of "natural" and "intentional" epidemics can mask inherent ethnic, class and national inequities, as well as state weapons programs that put civilian life in jeopardy. In combination, structural inequities and militarism normalize tolerance for collective death, especially as it affects marginal and disadvantaged groups, while also provoking public fears of biological agents as weapons of mass destruction.

Jeanne Guilleman is a medical anthropologist, and a Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at MIT's Security Studies Program. In 1992, she was part of a team that investigated a suspicious anthrax epidemic that took place in 1979 in the former USSR. She is an affiliate of the Harvard-Sussex Program, which is involved with the elimination of chemical and biological weapons. She is the author of Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001)

PAOLO PALLADINO Friday, February 27^th, 2004

Science Center, Room 101, 12:30-1:45PM

Presenting the Lynd Colloquium:

Just War? Reflections on the Political and the Natural in the Age of 'Just War'

Abstract: The recent revival of 'just war' as a viable political concept marks not the failure of politics, but is instead the continuation of the latter 'by other means'. Yet, if 'just war' once also stood for the effort to realise universal community, the 'true life', it now stands effectively for the affirmation of 'natural man', always at war with others and always under threat of death. Arguably, however, the entire situation rests on a problematic juxtaposition of politics and nature, of humans and animals, which was supposedly first advanced by Aristotle, when he wrote that 'man is by nature a political animal'. In his presentation, Dr. Palladino will re-examine Aristotle's dictum and the questions it raises about how to best understand the relationship between humans and animals, or the political and the natural. He will advance the thesis that Aristotle, possibly the first political philosopher and most certainly the first naturalist, confronted a problem that he was never able to fully resolve, namely the relationship between 'self' and 'other'. Furthermore, Dr. Palladino will advance the contemporary relevance of this thesis by drawing on John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt's In Athena's Camp (1997), a report for the Office of the Secretary of Defense on preparations for war in the 21st century, a report that radically reconfigures the relationship between humans and animals: 'swarming' is a pivotal tactic of 'network-centric warfare'.

Paolo Palladino is a Senior Lecturer and member of the Department of History at Lancaster University (UK) since 1995. His research interests include: the History of science, technology and medicine; life, embodiment, and political order; historiography after post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-colonialism. He has written Plants, Patients and the Historian: (Re)membering in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Manchester, 2002) and Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture: The Making of Scientific Careers in North America, 1885-1985 (Taylor and Francis, 1996), as well as a number of papers in British Journal for the History of Science, Economic History Review, Isis, History of Science, Journal of the History of Biology.

JACKIE ORR Friday, April 2nd, 2004

Science Center, Room 101. 12:30-1:45PM

Making Civilian-Soldiers: The Militarization of Inner Space

Abstract: This talk addresses the contemporary militarization of U.S. civilian psychology in the context of World War II and Cold War efforts to target the psychic and emotional life of civilians as a battlefield component of ‘total war.’ Selectively tracing the entangled histories of academic social science, the mass media, military technologies, and U.S. government agencies, I suggest that the post-World War II emergence of the U.S. national security state is founded in part on the calculated promotion of civilian insecurity and terror. From the televising of U.S. atomic bomb tests in Nevada to ‘Operation Alert’ exercises (1954-57) when thousands of civilians participated in a simulated response to Soviet nuclear attack, strategies for productively frightening the U.S. population have become a significant feature of U.S. political history and popular culture. The militarization of civilian psychology—that is, the psychological re-organization of civil society for the production of violence—becomes historically visible as an administrative imperative of U.S. government. This visibility, I argue, is important in interrogating and intervening in the complex politics and cultures of terrorism today.

Jackie Orr is Assistant Professor, Sociology, Syracuse University, Her recent invited Performances/Lectures include "'Keep Calm!' for the Cold War: PSYCHOpower and the Social Management of Collective Panic,” which was presented at the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, and "Panic Diaries: Performing Sickness, Practicing Cure." A multimedia performance sponsored by the Matrilineage Symposium on Women, Art and Change.

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A light vegetarian lunch will be served.