Harvard PhD Candidate Bridget Hanna to Give Talk at Annual Sympsium on the 1984 Union Carbide Disaster in Bhopal
On Friday, April 4, we will hold the 2014 CAS Annual Symposium, which features four scholars who will present on various topics concerning the relationship between catastrophe and culture in Asia. Bridget Hanna will present a talk entitled "Catastrophic 'Experiments' and Corporeal Categories: Bhopal Gas Victims as 'Special' Citizens" beginning at 2:20 p.m. in the British and Irish Studies Room on the fifth floor of the Norlin Library.
The Bhopal Disaster – the 1984 gas leak from an American-owned chemical plant into a densely populated central Indian city – was paradigmatic event of the risk society. Not only was it a novel and unique catastrophe: it was also a massive, uncontrolled, and largely undocumented experiment, one conducted with neither a protocol nor a control, on a sleeping city. What unfolded initially as the accidental exposure of 500,000 people to an unknown combination of deadly gases, has become over time (for those who have survived) an ongoing struggle for cure in the face of an ill that experts have still not fully defined. Rather, extant notions of treatment, illness, and exposure have been retrofit to Bhopal with mixed results, in an ongoing attempt to respond to, or perhaps neutralize, the suffering of the victims. Today, debates over detoxification, chronicity, stigma, categorization, and even clinical trials, are continuing to play out over the bodies of the gas-affected. In this talk I describe the medical institutions and practices that have arisen to manage the relationship of the gas-exposed to their health, in order to expose how medical uncertainty and the creation of “special” categories has constrained both access to care, and hopes for healing.
Bridget Hanna is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard. Her research is on the medical aftermath of the Bhopal gas disaster, and her dissertation looks at themes of uncertainty, classification, and the narration of environmental causality. She is co-author of The Bhopal Reader, and author of several articles and chapters on the gas disaster, and on global health. She is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado, Boulder.