Learning from Disaster?: The History of Technology and the Future of Disaster Research

Sociotechnical Resilience: A Preliminary Concept

“…At the same time, informational exchanges between humans (managers, workers, general public) serve to present a detailed view of technology use, adoption, and rejection . Informational relations can also provide insights for social demographics and technical change in averting risks that may present “slow disasters” that are not delimited by specific spatiotemporal markers and manifest themselves in public consciousness after becoming deep‐rooted vulnerabilities . Therefore, quality of informational relations must be highlighted in sociotechnical resilience.…”

<b>Making and Doing Politics Through Grassroots Scientific Research on the Energy and Petrochemical Industries</b>

“…The first three papers of this thematic collection look at attempts to invent or redesign tools for environmental science, with a focus on how STS researchers can be involved in community-based science efforts in "slow" disaster zones (Knowles 2014) A third paper looks at the long tail of natural gas and oil production through the lens of studying disposal of downstream oil products. "Compromised Agency: The Case of BabyLegs," by Max Liboiron, recounts the story of inventing a low cost device for the study of marine plastic pollution that employs gender norms to subvert the structure of the university patenting system and keep the device in the public domain.…”

“…While liberal empathy and media attention are most easily trained on event-based irruptions of harm that stand out from the ordinary, the products and toxicities of late industrialism are not limited to moments of spectacular failure; "slow disasters" are inescapable even during the normal functioning of industrial infrastructure (Nash 2006;Knowles 2014;Shapiro 2015;Beck 1992;Erikson 1994;Perrow 2011;Nixon 2011;EDAction 2016).…”

Articulating the Effects of Infrastructure Resourcing on Air Force Missions: Competing Approaches to Inform the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution System

“…Scott Gabriel Knowles (2014) argues that the extent of degradation of U.S. infrastructure is further evidenced by the damage from many recent natural disasters, including the failure of the New Orleans levee and dewatering system in Hurricane Katrina and the "Northeast blackout of 2003." Although addressing resilience to disasters as a specific concern is beyond the scope of this analysis, those in the Air Force and DoD concerned with mission assurance and critical infrastructure ought to take notice.…”

“…For public institutions, some of the reasons often cited involve structural incentives: Officials get more credit for new infrastructure spending than for maintenance spending (Knowles, 2014); short terms in office mean that there are few electoral advantages in supporting projects that pay off years after officials have left office, and if officials cut maintenance spending, they may not be around when things go wrong (Knowles, 2014); budgeting and accounting processes create disincentives for cost-effective investments in maintenance and repair (NRC, 1998); and the distributed nature of decisionmaking about federal facilities investments can result in a lack of accountability for stewardship (NRC, 1998(NRC, , 2004.…”