Speaker: Dr. Jason von Meding
Associate Professor
M.E Rinker, Sr. School of Construction Management, Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER) , University of Florida
Thursday, February 6, 2020
2:50-3:50 PM (Period 8)
Turlington Hall Room 3018
University of Florida
All are welcome to attend.
Framing disasters as something natural absolves those creating risk of responsibility and leads to policy and practice that perpetuate a status quo focused on technocratic measures to reduce risk and build resilience. Working with Dr. Ksenia Chmutina (Loughborough University, UK) and Dr. Colin Tucker Smith (UF), Dr. von Meding studies the intersection of language, risk mitigation, urban planning, and behavioral social psychology. This presentation will look at a recent exploratory correlational experiment using Project Implicit with a sample >400 to demonstrate the impact of understanding disasters as “natural” rather than “socially-constructed”. The findings provide support for the assertion – made in a previous systematic review of disaster literature by von Meding and Chmutina – that failure to recognize social/political/economic root causes of disasters serves to protect powerful interests and works counter to systemic change. Indeed, this narrative of “naturalness” provides ideological cover for the continued creation of risk through reconstruction processes friendly to the neoliberal status quo.