BookTalk - Training For Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11
Wednesday, November 10, 2021 8pm
About this Event
Add to calendarThe Center for the Humanities is pleased to present Assist. Professor of English Lindsay Thomas for her BookTalk
Training For Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11The
A timely, politically savvy examination of how impossible disasters shape the very real possibilities of our world
Why would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.
Thomas finds fiction at work in unexpected settings, from policy documents and workplace training manuals to comics and video games. Through these texts—as well as plenty of science fiction—she examines the philosophy of preparedness, interrogating the roots of why it asks us to treat explicitly fictional events as real. Thomas connects this philosophical underpinning to how preparedness plays out in contemporary politics, emphasizing how it uses aesthetic elements like realism, genre, character, and plot to train people both to regard some disasters as normal and to ignore others.
Event Details
0 people are interested in this event
User Activity
No recent activity
