Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
High-risk technologies cannot prevent, predict, or contain disasters while discourses about such disasters exhibit uncontrolled interpretive possibilities. There is no safe haven, no place that can be free of technological disasters, and such 'unnecessary' violence. What we can plan are escape routes and lifeboats that may rescue us occasionally and fail at other times. Paradoxically lifeboats, radars, containment measures, meters, backup systems cannot shelter all of us from technological risk. Is this the meaning of civilization and human progress? We need to question not merely high-risk technology and its engendered profit but the cultural future premised on such technological risk and the effective normative normalization of a risk society that sociologist Ulrich Beck theorized in his book Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.
Repository Citation
Arora, Vibha. "Review of Decade of Disaster, by Ann Larabee." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1–5. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss2/18