G65.3007: Topics in Science Studies – Science and Fear
Seminar Syllabus
Fall 2009
Can Science explain fear? Can it soothe fear? Is science itself a source of fear in the modern
world? Over the twentieth century especially, science and fear seem to have become
increasingly intertwined. The supposedly awesome, mysterious, and sometimes unsettling
power of science and technology to remake—and perhaps destroy—the world has become joined
by what appears to be their inability to manage emerging threats, some of their own doing,
including environmental collapse and new epidemic diseases. In this seminar, we’ll face our
science-related fears from a variety of historical, social, and critical perspectives. Because
studying the intersection of science and fear is still a relatively new area of academic endeavor,
we’ll be drawing from an eclectic mix of topics and readings, from scholarly works to
declassified documents and government reports to newspaper articles and blog entries. In the
second half of the semester, we’ll also focus on a number of case studies where the complex
relations between science and fear have been clearly visible.
Topics we’ll be covering include: the science of fear, the political and ideological construction of
fear, the rise of the risk society, and moral and mass panics. The case studies we’ll be discussing
are: Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the World broadcast, reactions to nuclear weapons, responses to
natural and technological disasters, the handling of epidemic diseases, the debate over GM foods,
and the threat of nanotechnological grey goo. And we’ll be reading selections from the
following texts:
Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (2005)
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1992)
Betsy Hartmann, Banu Subramaniam, and Charles Zerner, eds., Making Threats:
Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (2005)
Erich Goode and Nochman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics (1994)
Andrei S. Markovits and Karl W. Deutsch, eds., Fear of Science—Trust in Science (1980)
Jeffry V. Mallow, Science Anxiety: Fear of Science and How to Overcome It (1981)
Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars (1940)
Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear (1988)
Henry W. Fischer, Response to Disaster: Fact Versus Fiction and Its Perpetuation (2008)
So, join in…if you dare!