Episode overview
Episode 3 expands Season 10’s exploration of Contemplating Catastrophe with a wide-ranging conversation on urbanism, technology, space, and time. The episode brings together historical, geographical, and critical perspectives to examine how disasters are produced, anticipated, governed, and lived—often long before any so-called “event” occurs.
Hosts
Jason von Meding
Ksenia Chmutina
Guests
Zachary Loeb — historian of technology and disasters, Purdue University
Kevin Grove — professor of geography, Florida International University
Key themes
Technology, risk, and the invention of new forms of catastrophe
Urbanism and disaster as historically produced conditions
Reading beyond disaster studies: technology critique, political geography, Black studies, and Caribbean thought
Space, time, and temporality in disaster scholarship
Warnings, prediction, and why societies fail to listen
Power, knowledge, and whose experiences of space and time count
Interdisciplinarity as a core strength of disaster studies
Core discussion highlights
Zachary Loeb reflects on how critiques of technology—shaped by thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Paul Virilio—frame disasters as built into technological systems themselves, rather than accidental failures.
The idea that every technological invention also invents its own accident becomes a lens for understanding contemporary risks, including digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
Kevin Grove discusses how moments of discomfort and contradiction in fieldwork can become catalysts for deeper theoretical engagement, particularly through biopolitics, Caribbean studies, and Black geographies.
Edward Soja and Doreen Massey are explored as thinkers who radically reshaped how scholars understand space, difference, and the politics of knowledge production.
The episode challenges linear disaster timelines by introducing multiple, co-existing temporalities—slow disaster, repetition, duration, and suspended presents—especially as experienced by marginalized communities.
Space is framed as lively, relational, and unfinished, while time is shown to be unevenly distributed and historically produced through violence, colonialism, and capitalism.
