Thirty-five years after the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the interdisciplinary virtual conference Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster considers its afterlife and reverberations in various disciplines, including culture and the arts. Situated at a watershed moment during the Cold War, Chernobyl has spawned an unprecedented quantity of global responses from scientists, writers, filmmakers, and artists, and it has become a key moment for the global environmental movement. This conference views the accident and its aftermath in the context of broader global ecologies of disaster and considers how catastrophe is coded and understood — or fails to be understood — through the prism of science, art, literature, and film. How do all these disciplines and discourses confront the disaster, and where do they converge to produce the fiction, or the truth, of what we call “Chernobyl”? The conference brings together scholars and experts in Comparative Literature, History, Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Nuclear Engineering, Medicine, Art, Film, and Germanic and Slavic Studies. (Rescheduled from April 2020 when it was postponed due to COVID-19.)

 

Download Poster

Summary Of Events

Thursday, April 29th, 2021 - 4:00 pm
"The Babushkas of Chernobyl"

A CWC Virtual Film Discussion with Director Holly Morris, Carsey-Wolf Center, University of California, Santa Barbara

Register in Advance for Virtual Film Discussion via Carsey-Wolf Center Here

Friday, April 30th, 2021 - 9:00-4:00 pm
Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster

An Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference, Convened by Sara Pankenier Weld and Sven Spieker, Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Register in Advance to Attend Virtual Conference over Zoom Here

(After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.)

The symposium is sponsored by the Division of Arts and Letters and the T. A. Barron Environmental Fund. Event partners include the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, the Graduate Center for Literary Research, and the Carsey-Wolf Center. Other sponsors include the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Department of Global Studies, Comparative Literature Program, Environmental Studies, Cold War Studies, College of Creative Studies, and History Department.

 

Download Conference Event Program here