CHAPTER 5

The Politics of Producing Social Science Disaster Knowledge: From the COVID-19 Pandemic to the Cold War

Cécile Stephanie Stehrenberger

A remarkable 1955 letter, preserved at the US National Academy of Sciences Archives, illustrates the messiness of public health communication in the midst of a disaster: “In time of disaster when health problems are serious to the point of epidemic proportions, what information will the populace believe and accept from legal public health authorities or from other sources? I wonder if this is a situation which we should request the NRC [National Research Council] to study for us.”1

The “situation” referred to in this letter was a severe polio outbreak in Massachusetts in July and August of the same year that impacted several hundred children. Consequently, in some communities school openings after summer vacation were delayed. In mid-September, a team directed by John A. Clausen, from the National Institute of Mental Health’s Laboratory of Socio-Environmental Studies, and Harry B. Williams, the technical director of the National Research Council’s Committee on Disaster Studies, conducted a study, interviewing 326 mothers of school-age children in order to obtain a better understanding of “the perceptions and beliefs of parents relative to the action taken.”2 The published findings showed that only a small proportion of the interviewees had a comprehensive understanding of health officials’ recommendations and that a small proportion of parents who regarded the opening of school as a real threat were able to make their “opinions felt to such a degree that official policies were modified.”3

The 1955 polio outbreak study illustrates how social scientific interest in epidemics, specifically in regard to questions about the type of information disaster-stricken people are willing to accept, is not a historical novelty. And yet, as the COVID-19 pandemic started to unfold, commentators—including scientists from various disciplines and fields—primarily underlined its alleged unprecedented nature.

Many findings by social science disaster researchers of the Cold War period regarding human behavior in epidemics and other disasters remained largely ignored, including Enrico Quarantelli’s deconstruction of the “mass panic” myth.4 Yet at the same time, some approaches to disasters developed by disaster researchers have indeed been frequently used during the pandemic.

By exploring the activities of the NRC’s Committee on Disaster Studies, founded in 1952, as well as its predecessor, the first institutionalized “social science disaster research” group founded in 1949 at the National Opinion Research Center, and the Disaster Research Center, established in 1963, this chapter reflects on both the presence and the absence of Cold War disaster research during the COVID-19 crisis. The goal of this chapter is to examine the politics behind social scientific disaster knowledge production in terms of both its research interests and its scientific practices.

Regulatory Knowledge and Event Thinking

The key to beating the COVID-19 virus lay, according to many scientists, journalists, and politicians, in successfully managing individual and collective human behavior.5 This idea has been at the heart of disaster-related thought and action since the eighteenth century, when the general need to manage epidemics efficiently by guiding and regulating the population led to new forms of “governmentality.”6 In the Cold War era, when it was understood that the next war could be won if the “human factor” remained under control,7 the idea that human behavior was not only pivotal to preparing successfully for disaster of any type but also manipulable in multiple ways was particularly omnipresent. This belief was foundational to the birth of social science disaster research.

The primary goal of disaster research—the reason why different US military branches and various governmental institutions financed the activities of the newly founded “disaster research groups’’ in the 1950s and the Disaster Research Center in the 1960s—was the production of regulatory knowledge that could be applied to predict and shape human behavior in future disasters of various types, in particular US civilians’ reaction to a Soviet nuclear attack. This goal guided disaster researchers’ selection of research topics. During the 1950s they studied disasters that were thought to be similar to what they believed such a nuclear attack would look like. They focused on disasters that came suddenly, even sometimes as a surprise, causing destruction that was concentrated in a clearly definable temporal and geographical space, such as earthquakes and blizzards.

Even when civilian funding sources increased, disaster researchers retained their narrow focus on geographically bound and sudden-onset disasters. A 1961 publication by disaster sociologist Charles Fritz even defined disaster as a disruptive, anormal event concentrated in time and space.8 This notion has remained highly influential even though its longevity is not due to a shortage of alternatives. The entry of environmental and technological disasters into the political and scientific realms in the 1970s and 1980s led, for example, to the formulation of concepts such as “chronic disaster” and “normal accidents.”9 The success of event-thinking of disasters has a lot to do with the apparent short-term investment in disaster mitigation such a perspective allows. This was put on display during the COVID-19 pandemic when much of the US mitigation efforts were catastrophically short-termed.

Several years after the start of the pandemic, the messiness of its temporality is undeniable. While the virus itself appeared relatively suddenly, it was not without warning, and the destruction it cocaused was in some respects also fast-paced. Yet the underlying conditions it collided with, which were largely responsible for the catastrophic magnitude of the disaster, had been present for decades and centuries. These include chronic poverty and systemic racism as well as environmental destruction and pollution, all phenomena rooted in Western modernity and its coloniality.

Moreover, the pandemic is also a slow disaster, a form of “slow violence” that unfolds its destructive effect over a very long time and a wide space. This is true of not only (seemingly) strictly medical phenomena such as long COVID but also the exacerbation of social and global inequality the pandemic has caused and the long-term impacts that are difficult to calculate.10

The Pitfalls of the Behavior-Centric View

Disaster as a concentrated event, a notion born out of Cold War goals of producing regulatory knowledge (for a nuclear attack), is an inadequate approach for grasping the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the Cold War–era goal also came with a problematic focus on behavior.

Human behavior had been pivotal in the scientific traditions in which the scholars of the first disaster research groups were rooted, notably the Chicago School of Sociology. Just like in other social science fields, the understanding of human behavior gradually became more nuanced as scientists distanced themselves from the biological determinism of behaviorism.11 However, the specter of determinism kept haunting the study of behavior. This holds true for disaster research as well. This was largely due to the fact that the (military) sponsors’ understanding of behavior was very reductionist and centered around its technical manipulability with positive and negative stimuli. Hence, disaster research’s focus on behavior was prone to giving way to mechanistic and depoliticizing conceptions of human action.

In analyzing both individual and collective behavior, these researchers drew attention to a second specter: the “masses.” The economic and political power of large collectives had become a major concern and epistemic object in many political and scientific realms since the second half of the nineteenth century. Authors such as Gustave Le Bon promoted a deeply classist and racialized understanding of “herds,” in which the animalistic instincts of lowly people led to completely irrational and dangerous “crowd behavior.”12 A crucial trope of this notion of collectives as “herds,” which was frequently reproduced during the pandemic, was the image of “mass panic.”

A critical examination of the pitfalls of the herd image in epidemiology and science communication has already been undertaken by Warkwick Anderson. He notes that “in thus being treated as a herd, people find that the scope of social life, its range of potentialities, gets constricted and homogenized; and they feel ever more alienated and excluded from decision making.”13 Anderson goes on to ask “Can critique reconstitute the crisis as a more encompassing and ambient subject of knowledge, affording room to maneuver? Can it socialize or deherd or ecologize or even queer our models?”14 Moreover, I would ask, does the COVID-19 pandemic finally propel us to de-herd not just epidemiological but also social science disaster thinking? If so, would this de-herding allow us to de-behavioralize that thinking, thereby politicizing it?

The behavioral focus in the social sciences emerged during the disciplines’ establishment as sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By observing behavior in actual and metaphorical laboratories instead of conducting “armchair speculations” on complex social processes, sociologists and psychologists were able to enter the realm of positivist distant objectivity.15 This objectivity was constantly threatened in social science disaster research for two key reasons: first, the frequent reliance on military funding that threatened its independence, and second, its anchoring methodological practice of field-based studies.

Field Studies, Social Diversity, and the Research Logic of Distancing

Field studies had traditionally been the method of choice of the Chicago School of Sociology, whose most prominent representative, Herbert Blumer, had been the PhD adviser of several pioneers of disaster research, including Quarantelli. Disaster researchers remained attached to this school in many ways, including to the notion that the authenticity of presence in the field provided epistemic advantages and authority.16 These advantages were also of a competitive nature. The study of real disasters right where and when they occurred contrasted and complemented the endeavor to simulate future disaster through, for example, the scenario-building practiced during the 1950s at the RAND Corporation.17

Being “in on the action” through rapid-response field studies also became an important part of the scientific identity and culture of disaster research. Throughout the following decades, disaster research invested a lot of resources in perfecting the method, contributing to researchers’ continuing preference for field studies over other approaches.

This preference had severe epistemic consequences. It prevented disaster researchers from engaging with epidemics they recognized as slow disasters—which were very difficult to study in rapid-response field studies—and hence from championing an understanding of disaster that recognized their temporal messiness. Moreover, there was a connection between the method of field studies and the social composition of disaster research. As Kathleen Tierney explains, it was believed that men were “better able to cope with the hardships of postdisaster fieldwork.”18 This belief contributed to women being severely underrepresented in disaster research well into the 1990s. Following insights from feminist science studies scholars,19 it can be argued that this led to a male bias that obscured the role of gender in disaster research. Likewise, the relative absence of leading Black, Brown, and Indigenous scholars in the field until the 1970s explains in part why disaster researchers failed to systematically investigate how the unfolding of disasters and their management are impacted by racism. Meanwhile, as William Anderson—disaster research’s first and for a long time only leading Black scholar—pointed out in a 1970 article, the field was a place in which the racial identity—real or ascribed—of a researcher largely influenced the willingness of an interviewee to pass along certain information.20

In the same article, Anderson reported on instances in which interviewees from Black militant groups tried to recruit him as a member.21 Similar instances of research subjects drawing the researchers toward themselves were already problematized by Quarantelli in a 1966 talk: “ I am sitting there, and the Civil Defense Director, whom I had gotten to know very well by then, turned to me and said: ‘You’re a specialist in disaster. What should I do with this?’ . . . I admit there is a temptation to offer advice. . . . But we take the viewpoint, like physicians when they are testing some drug, that we donnot [sic] get identified in that particular way. We are researchers first and last.”22 Field studies involved encounters that jeopardized the distant objectivity that disaster researchers considered essential to their field’s scientific integrity. However, objectivity was also threatened by the goal of producing practical knowledge. In objectivity’s defense, researchers adapted a research logic of distancing that implied, in the situation Quarantelli reconstructed, that practical knowledge was not transmitted when it stood good chances of being applied.

Revelation, Arresting Stories That Count, and Activist Science

The natural sciences also served as reference when disaster researchers of the 1960s wrote about the revealing nature of disasters. The idea that a disaster brings to the fore hidden truths about humans can be traced back to premodern times.23 Cold War disaster researchers backed this up scientifically by describing disasters as “laboratories” in which the underlying structures and “patterns” of societies would become observable.24

In the context of COVID-19, the notion of the revealing disaster has been nearly ubiquitous, often alongside the “laboratory” or “experiment” terminology but also with that of the “contrast medium.” Contrast media are, or produce, sharp demarcations. The metaphorical use of the term betrays an understanding of disasters as unveiling normality, because they supposedly are in opposition to normality. This view is connected to Cold War disaster researchers such as Fritz, who interpreted them as providing a “clean break” from the past.25 Moreover, Fritz explained disasters’ revealing effect as being caused by their capacity of “compressing vital social processes into a brief timespan and by bringing normally private behavior under public observation,”26 a property that the slow disasters of COVID-19 do not possess.

According to Thom Davies, the “slow violence” of “slow disaster” “does not persist due to a lack of arresting stories” about it “but because those stories do not count.”27 This also holds true with respect to the slow violence that COVID-19 allegedly exposes, including capitalism, racism, and sexism, which have been visible and have been called out as underlying causes for disaster for decades. Among those telling “arresting stories” have been Cold War disaster researchers, though only from the 1970s onward.

How can disaster scholars increase the chances that the “arresting stories” they tell count? One could argue that they could tell better stories by, for example, analyzing the racism they encounter with insights, methodological approaches, and theoretical tools from across disciplines. Here, they might take inspiration from what the NRC’s Committee on Disaster Studies did and attempted to do during the 1950s, before the disciplinary narrowing of disaster research toward sociology, by funding the disaster work of scholars from various disciplines, many of whom were not career disaster researchers.

Moreover, disaster research could follow what can perhaps be called the narrative turn observed in fields such as Black feminist science studies and Indigenous environmental cultural studies.28 That is the insight that to convey impactful knowledge in the face of crisis and catastrophe, scholars necessitate ways of communicating beyond the codes and signals of the usual representation of (positivist, distant) Western science (writing).

Even more important are the goals behind not only knowledge communication but also production—that is, the aim to carry out science that contributes to radical socioeconomic transformations, which has been increasingly shared in many fields in the past few years. In a 2019 paper, Max Liboiron and Jennifer Henderson argued that knowledge production in active disaster zones calls for an overcoming of “hands-off observations for short-term research projects,” making the case for “activist research” that embraces the fact that the research is “naturally compromised.”29 The volume in which this piece was published was edited in part by two scholars who were and are core faculty at the Disaster Research Center, suggesting that the successors of the Cold War disaster researchers are more and more crawling out from the shell of the Cold War defensive intellectualism of their predecessors.

It is important to underline that the first generation of disaster researchers hid in that shell precisely because they did not (fully) embrace the defense intellectualism that was demanded by their military sponsors. In fact, the research findings that disaster researchers, especially William Anderson, came up with implied a far-reaching critique of the ineffective civil defense management of disaster situations. As a result of the military sponsorship, the 1960s were not an ideal moment for scholars to become loud and radical voices of change, and the 1970s were still a time in which the accusation of “communism” could very much thwart a scholars’ academic opportunities, particularly that of female and Black academics.

The fact that disaster researchers were not becoming more radical even when external factors, such as the end of military funding and the social transformations of the 1970s, would have made such a shift possible illuminates the long-lasting power of the “politics of methods,” of research logics and of ideals of science, and of science being “politics with other means.”30 These politics were among the factors preventing disaster researchers from closing ranks with the activist researchers producing disaster knowledge on the environmental disasters of the 1970s and 1980s.

COVID-19 and the Politicization of Disaster Research

In recent years, however, many disaster researchers have deliberately positioned themselves politically. The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled this development. Moreover, in its wake the fantasy of science’s “view” as “coming from nowhere” yet “seeing all” has been left further behind, giving way to the insight that robust knowledge can only come from integrating multiple perspectives and from research groups that are more diverse and have a more participatory practice.31

This is not the place for an in-depth analysis of the factors behind and specific moments of what might be called the politicization (and, for some, the radicalization) of social science disaster scholars during the COVID-19 pandemic. What is important is that it involved the acknowledgment of links—via structures of inequality, exploitation, and oppression—between the pandemic and other moments of violence and chronic slow-moving disasters, such as the murder of George Floyd and climate change.32

The event thinking of disaster described here was not the only conceptual legacy of Cold War disaster research that has become more intensely criticized in the past couple of years. It was also the notion of resilience that disaster sociologists such as Charles Fritz began championing—though not yet using the term in the 1950s. The pandemic has made (even more) clear how the idea of social entities’ ability to bounce back from and even grow with disaster, without outside interventions, has served to legitimize neoliberal politics of individual responsibility and of governmental irresponsibility.

One of the problematic dimensions of the idea of resilience lies in its focus on individual behavior instead of on structures and political action. In Cold War social science disaster research, the focus on behavior was informed by intellectual traditions in which such a focus seemed to allow for objective (in the positivist sense) science. Consequently, the de-behavioralization of disaster research is an important part in its continuing politicization.

One of the gateways toward this politicization is also the profound historization of the field. The COVID-19 pandemic has, for example, through an expanded notion of the term “preexisting condition,”33 deepened the will of disaster studies scholars—including the nonhistorian ones—to think historically. By including more history of science perspectives, which sharpen the analytical tools of self-reflection, future researchers can more deeply engage with the epistemic consequences of certain research methods and acknowledge that the inequalities at stake can be known by more diverse and empathetic scientists who engage in more egalitarian ways with those with whom they do research.

Notes

1. 1.  Dr. Lemons to Dr. Hozier, September 14, 1955, Folder: Public Reactions to Polio Outbreak, National Academy of Sciences Archives, Division of Anthropology and Psychology, Disaster Research Group, National Research Council.
2. 2.  John A. Clausen and Erwin L. Linn, “Public Reaction to a Severe Polio Outbreak in Three Massachusetts Communities,” Social Problems 4, no. 1 (1956): 41, https://doi.org/10.2307/798566.
3. 3.  Clausen and Linn, “Public Reaction to a Severe Polio Outbreak,” 50.
4. 4.  Enrico L. Quarantelli, “The Nature and Conditions of Panic,” American Journal of Sociology 60, no. 3 (November 1954): 267–75, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2772684. The phantasm of “panic” was perhaps most famously used by, at the time, US President Donald Trump who, referring to the need of avoiding such panic, legitimized his attempts of “playing down” the severity of the pandemic. Kevin Freking and Zeke Miller, “Book: Trump Said of Virus, ‘I Wanted to always Play It Down,’” Associated Press, September 9, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/ap-travel-virus-outbreak-donald-trump-ap-top-news-bob-woodward-c9f35842f7bb355be72842d15a8f7c02.
5. 5.  See, for example, Nurit Guttman and Eimi Lev, “Ethical Issues in COVID-19 Communication to Mitigate the Pandemic: Dilemmas and Practical Implications,” Health Communication 36, no. 1 (2021): 116–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2020.1847439. See also Christoph A. Hafner and Tongle Sun, “The ‘Team of 5 Million’: The Joint Construction of Leadership Discourse during the Covid-19 Pandemic in New Zealand,” Discourse, Context & Media 43 (October 2021): 100523, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2021.100523.
6. 6.  Michel Foucault, Security, Territory and Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
7. 7.  M. Susan Lindee, Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War (Harvard University Press, 2020).
8. 8.  Charles Fritz, “Disasters,” in Contemporary Social Problems, ed. Robert King Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 655.
9. 9.  Stephen R. Couch and J. Stephen Kroll-Smith, “The Chronic Technical Disaster: Toward a Social Scientific Perspective,” Social Science Quarterly 66, no. 3 (1985): 564. See also Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Basic Books, 1984).
10. 10.  On alternative ways of thinking the temporality of disaster in general, see Tomás Usón and Cécile Stehrenberger, “A Temporal Device: Disasters and the Articulation of (De)acceleration in and Beyond 1970 Ancash Earthquake,” Res Publica: Revista de Historia de las Ideas Políticas 24, no. 3 (2021): 467–80, https://doi.org/10.5209/rpub.79245.
11. 11.  Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
12. 12.  For an overview on “collective behavior,” see Raymond L. M. Lee, “Mutating Multitudes, Collective Behavior, and Reinventing a Sociological Specialty,” American Sociologist 51, no. 4 (2020): 425–45, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09450-4.
13. 13.  Warwick Anderson, “The Model Crisis, or How to Have Critical Promiscuity in the Time of Covid-19,” Social Studies of Science 51, no. 2 (2021), 177, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312721996053.
14. 14.  Anderson, “The Model Crisis,” 179–80.
15. 15.  George Steinmetz, ed., The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others (Duke University Press, 2005).
16. 16.  See Robert E. Kohler, Inside Science: Stories from the Field in Human and Animal Science (University of Chicago Press, 2019).
17. 17.  Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (Princeton University Press, 2021).
18. 18.  Kathleen Tierney, “From the Margins to the Mainstream? Disaster Research at the Crossroads,” Annual Review of Sociology 33 (2007): 515, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.33.040406.131743.
19. 19.  Carla Fehr, “What Is in It for Me? The Benefits of Diversity in Scientific Communities,” in Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, ed. Heidi Grasswick (Springer 2011).
20. 20.  William A. Anderson, “Role Salience and Social Research: The Black Sociologist and Field Work among Black Groups,” American Sociologist (1970): 236–39, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27701626.
21. 21.  Anderson, “Role Salience and Social Research.”
22. 22.  Enrico L. Quarantelli, Problems of Field Research: Techniques and Procedures of the Disaster Research Center in the 1960s, Historical & Comparative Disaster Series No. 11 (Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, 1998), 29–30, http://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/1326.
23. 23.  Eva Horn, The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age, trans. Valentine Pakis (Columbia University Press, 2018).
24. 24.  Fritz, “Disasters,” 655.
25. 25.  Andy Horowitz, “Pandemics as History,” in The Long Year: A 2020 Reader, ed. Thomas J. Sugrue and Caitlin Zaloom (Columbia University Press, 2022).
26. 26.  Fritz, “Disasters,” 654–55.
27. 27.  Thom Davies, “Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies: ‘Out of Sight’ to Whom?,” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 40, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 3, https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654419841063.
28. 28.  Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2020).
29. 29.  Jennifer Henderson and Max Liboiron, “Compromise and Action: Tactics for Doing Ethical Research in Disaster Zones,” in Disaster Research and the Second Environmental Crisis, ed. James Kendra, Scott G. Knowles, and Tricia Wachtendorf (Springer, 2019).
30. 30.  Donna J. Haraway, “Primatology Is Politics by Other Means,” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984, no. 2 (1984): 488–524, https://doi.org/10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1984.2.192523.
31. 31.  Maheen Khan et al., “Epistemological Freedom: Activating Co-learning and Co-production to Decolonize Knowledge Production,” Disaster Prevention and Management 31, no. 3 (2022): 182–92, https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-03-2021-0070.
32. 32.  Eleonora Rohland, “COVID-19, Climate, and White Supremacy: Multiple Crises or One?,” Journal for the History of Environment and Society 5 (2020): 23–32, https://doi.org/10.1484/J.JHES.5.122460.
33. 33.  Horowitz, “Pandemics as History.”