ABSTRACT
Large-scale disasters have become privileged sites for STS analysis. Bhopal, Chernobyl, the Challenger, Katrina: such catastrophic events reveal the fissures of our technopolitical regimes, the fallacy of the nature-culture divide, and the power relations that shape and are enacted by our infrastructures. They offer particularly propitious places for exploring scalar shifts and slippages. Disasters transport us from O-rings and reactor instrumentation panels to structural secrecy in sociotechnical systems, and from those systems to problems of planetary pollution and human security. Along the way, we trace the tendrils of sociotechnical systems in order to disrupt notions of center and periphery; we hop through geographic and temporal scales; we see social dynamics and technopolitical relationships that might otherwise remain invisible. In short, disasters allow us to observe “the world in a machine.” 2
