S&S Scholars Award: Heat and Death in France: History and the Social Ecology of Catastrophe

2003年8月袭击法国的热浪被称为一场气象灾难，使法国陷入极端状态，导致近1.5万人意外死亡。然而，用自然灾害的语言来描述这场危机，忽略了一个关键点。将温度凌驾于人类社会和建筑环境之上，作为塑造死亡率的决定性变量，给人一种灾难不可避免的感觉，从而忽视了被热浪蹂躏的社会景观所发挥的关键作用。死亡率的显著差异——老年人、穷人和城市居民的死亡比例失调——表明，现代法国的社会生态和灾难的“自然”原因同样造成了风险模式，这引起了人们对社会、自然和环境安全的关注。巴黎及其周边地区在危机期间承受了过高死亡率的冲击，其经验为科学与社会关系的核心问题打开了一扇窗，包括脆弱性的历史产生，福利国家人口变化的影响，以及后工业时代建筑环境的可持续性。这个项目的核心是对政治、社会和文化因素的分析，这些因素使法国，尤其是巴黎，处于如此巨大的风险之中。热浪引发了一系列关于8月假期影响的激烈辩论——自20世纪30年代设立以来，许多法国人认为这是一项与生俱来的公民权利——在危机期间对弱势群体的遗弃和医院人手不足的影响。该项目通过质疑老年人的社会、政治和科学表征及其对社会公民的影响，审视了老年人在现代社会中的地位。现代法国对空调的强烈敌意——源于对美国式文化同质化的抵制——提供了另一个研究领域。最后，该项目探讨了自20世纪80年代以来“不安全感”话语的兴起及其在塑造城市脆弱性景观中的作用。由于对移民和社会混乱的不安，一种恐惧的气氛促使许多法国老年城市居民留在他们的公寓里，这增加了中暑的危险，但却避免了城市公共空间的危险。本项目将通过多个研究轴，包括在巴黎市中心和城郊的实地考察，以及对档案馆、图书馆和政府藏品的针对性研究，来研究在2003年灾难形成过程中发挥重要作用的这些现象和其他现象。对受灾严重地区的公民、政府官员、流行病学家和社会科学家的采访，以及对热浪发生时及其后果的媒体报道的密切分析，将阐明这场环境卫生和社会生态危机的关键社会层面。迄今为止，还没有关于法国热浪的人文主义或社会科学研究。这个项目将历史学家的眼光带到了当代环境危机的研究上，从而增加了越来越多的关于风险和脆弱性、环境正义和城市环境历史的STS文献。通过探索20世纪社会脆弱性的历史产生，该项目调查了环境灾难与法国城市当地社会世界的交集。哪些社会因素会影响环境危机中的风险？这些条件如何反映科学、政治和社会之间的关系？更广泛的影响本项目最雄心勃勃的目标是，利用科学、社会科学和人文学科的专业知识，促进建立一个研究脆弱性的新框架。灾难往往起到催化剂的作用，突出现有的社会、经济和文化分歧，使一个社会容易发生灾难。理想情况下，完成的专著和文章将有助于对危害管理的政策辩论，同时指出现代福利国家在后工业时代适应不断变化的社会、政治和环境气候的根本需要。

IntroductionDescribed as a meteorological catastrophe, the heat wave that struck France in August 2003 brought the nation to a state of extremity, resulting in nearly 15,000 unanticipated deaths. Yet to frame the crisis in the language of natural disaster misses a crucial point. Privileging temperature over human society and the built environment as the decisive variable in shaping mortality grants a sense of inevitability to the disaster, and thus overlooks the critical role played by a social landscape that was itself ravaged by the heat wave. Significant disparities in mortality -- the disproportional selection of the elderly, the poor, and city-dwellers for death -- indicate patterns of risk that resulted as much from the social ecology of modern France as from the "natural" causes of disaster, calling attention to the intersection of society, nature, and environmental security. The experience of Paris and its environs, which bore the brunt of excess mortality during the crisis, opens a window on issues central to the relationship between science and society, including the historical production of vulnerability, the implications of demographic change for the welfare state, and the sustainability of the built environment in the postindustrial era. Central to this project is an analysis of the political, social, and cultural factors that placed France, and particularly Paris, at such inordinate risk. The heat wave provoked a series of fierce debates over the influence of the August vacation -- viewed by many French as an inherent right of citizenship since its institution in the 1930s -- on the abandonment of the vulnerable and the understaffing of hospitals during the crisis. The project scrutinizes the place of the elderly in modern society by questioning social, political, and scientific representations of the elderly and their effects on social citizenship. A powerful animosity toward air conditioning in modern France -- with roots in resistance to American-style cultural homogenization -- offers another area of inquiry. Finally, the project explores the rise of a voluble discourse of "insecurity" since the 1980s and its role in shaping an urban landscape of vulnerability. Linked to uneasiness around immigration and social disorder, a climate of fear has contributed to an elevation of risk by encouraging many elderly French city-dwellers to remain in their apartments, at heightened danger for heat stroke, but spared from the perceived dangers of urban public space. This project will examine these and other phenomena that played essential roles in the shaping of the 2003 catastrophe via multiple axes of research, including fieldwork in central and periurban Paris and targeted research in archives, libraries, and government collections. Interviews with citizens in hard-hit areas, government officials, epidemiologists, and social scientists, along with close analysis of media coverage of the heat wave as it unfolded and in its aftermath, will illuminate the critical social dimensions of this crisis of environmental health and social ecology.Intellectual meritThere has as yet been no humanistic or social-scientific study of the French heat wave. This project brings the historian's eye to the study of contemporary environmental crisis, thereby adding to a growing body of STS literatures on risk and vulnerability, environmental justice, and the history of the urban environment. By exploring the historical production of social vulnerability over the course of the twentieth century, this project investigates the intersection of an environmental disaster with the local social worlds of urban France. What social factors shape risk in an environmental crisis? How do these conditions reflect the relationship between science, politics, and society?Broader impactAt its most ambitious, this project aims to contribute to the development of a new framework for studying vulnerability that draws on scientific, social-scientific, and humanistic forms of expertise. Disasters often operate as catalysts highlighting existing social, economic, and cultural divides that predispose a society to catastrophe. Ideally, the finished monograph and articles will contribute to policy debates over hazard management, while pointing to the essential need for the adaptation of the modern welfare state to changing social, political, and environmental climates in the postindustrial era.