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The Epistemology and Politics of the Accidental: Connecting the Accident’s Intellectual and Cultural Historiography
Author(s) -
Vieira Ryan Anthony
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
history compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.121
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 1478-0542
DOI - 10.1111/hic3.12035
Subject(s) - historiography , narrative , accident (philosophy) , accidental , politics , discipline , aesthetics , history , power (physics) , sociology , bridging (networking) , intellectual history , epistemology , criminology , political science , social science , literature , law , computer security , philosophy , art , physics , quantum mechanics , acoustics , computer science
In recent years, historians on both sides of the Atlantic have begun to reconsider the accident as an historical phenomenon. Whereas the historical treatment of accidents between the 1950s and 1980s tended to focus on how the accident contributed to a larger narrative of progress, the more recent literature has begun to focus on the accident’s role in wider social, political, and cultural contexts. As the historiography has developed, however, there has been only limited theoretical debate across sub‐disciplinary lines. The present paper does not represent an exhaustive examination of the recent historical literature on accidents in both Europe and North America. Instead, it focusses on bridging the gap between those historians who have studied the intellectual development of the accident as a concept and those who have studied the cultural intersection between the accident and power. It does this by focussing on the centrality of narrative in both historiographic trajectories and by suggesting that through a focus on narrative we can connect the epistemological assumptions inherent within the accident concept and the strategies employed to culturally manage the anxieties and stresses which violent technological disasters bring to the surface.