While trauma and loss can occur anywhere, most suffering is experienced as personal tragedy. Yet some tragedies transcend everyday life's sad but inevitable traumas to become notorious public events: de facto "public" tragedies. In these crises, suffering is made publicly visible and lamentable. Such tragedies are defined by public accusations, social blame, outpourings of grief and anger, spontaneous memorialization, and collective action. These, in turn, generate a comparable set of political reactions, including denial, denunciation, counterclaims, blame avoidance, and a competition to control memories of the event.
Disasters and crises are no more or less common today than in the past, but public tragedies now seem ubiquitous. After Tragedy Strikes argues that they are now epochal—public tragedies have become the day's definitive social and political events. Thomas D. Beamish deftly explores this phenomenon by developing the historical context within which these events occur and the role that political elites, the media, and an emergent ideology of victimhood have played in cultivating their ascendence.
Thomas D. Beamish is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, and author of Silent Spill: The Organization of an Industrial Crisis and Community at Risk: Biodefense and the Collective Search for Security.
"A very smart book about risk and disaster and, more importantly, the larger contexts in which those things are defined as such. I found this book more interesting than nearly all the sociology I've read in the past five or ten years. This is timely and will be one of those books that floats into and out of relevance. COVID isn't gone; it'll come back. And there will be other attacks like it. Climate change is, so smart people say, responsible for everything from your state burning up to my hangnail. Whether something is actually done about the state burning up will depend precisely on the kinds of points Beamish makes."—Lee Clarke, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Rutgers University
272 pp.6 x 9Illus: 1 b/w illustration, 9 tables
9780520401075$29.95|£25.00Paper
Apr 2024