Conference: Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster
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April 30, 2021 @ 9:00 am - 4:00 pm
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The interdisciplinary virtual conference “Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster” will take place on Friday, April 30, 2021 at 9:00am-4:00pm, with an international slate of speakers representing a variety of disciplines who will share their insights on the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.
Thirty-five years after the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the interdisciplinary virtual conference Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster considers its afterlife and reverberations in various disciplines, including culture and the arts. Situated at a watershed moment during the Cold War, Chernobyl has spawned an unprecedented quantity of global responses from scientists, writers, filmmakers, and artists, and it has become a key moment for the global environmental movement. This conference views the accident and its aftermath in the context of broader global ecologies of disaster and considers how catastrophe is coded and understood — or fails to be understood — through the prism of science, art, literature, and film. How do all these disciplines and discourses confront the disaster, and where do they converge to produce the fiction, or the truth, of what we call “Chernobyl”? The conference brings together scholars and experts in Comparative Literature, History, Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Nuclear Engineering, Medicine, Art, Film, and Germanic and Slavic Studies. (Rescheduled from April 2020 when it was postponed due to COVID-19.)
An associated Carsey-Wolf Center virtual discussion of the award-winning documentary “The Babushkas of Chernobyl,” with Director Holly Morris, will take place at 4pm on Thursday, April 29, 2021, before which registered participants can pre-screen the film.
Sponsored by the College of Letters and Science and the T. A. Barron Environmental Fund. Event partners include the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, Graduate Center for Literary Research, and Carsey-Wolf Center. Other sponsors include the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Department of Global Studies, Comparative Literature Program, Environmental Studies, Cold War Studies, College of Creative Studies, and History Department.
