April 13, 2018
East Gallery, Buell Hall
On Friday, April 13, 2018, the Buell Center hosted a workshop on "Climate, Infrastructure, and Emergency Powers" as a part of its "Power: Infrastructure in America" research initiative. Recognizing the necessity for emergency preparedness under constitutional democracy, one can nonetheless observe that infrastructural crises associated with climate-related events have increasingly become the basis for the suspension or undermining of democratic institutions and the dramatic reshaping of environments, as in the case of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, and possibly Houston after Hurricane Harvey, among others. Invited workshop guests discussed this and related ecological, spatial, and political issues across disciplines, as well as intellectual and institutional strategies for studying these processes and drawing greater public attention to their implications.
Participants included:
Fallon Samuels Aidoo, University of New Orleans
Daniel A. Barber, University of Pennsylvania
David Bond, Bennington College
Ashley Dawson, Princeton Environmental Institute
Anthony Fontenot, Woodbury University
Andy Horowitz, Tulane University
Andrea Muehlebach, University of Toronto
Cassandra Shepard, Northwestern University
Albert Pope, Rice University
Abby Spinak, Harvard University