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Volunteers needed! Please suggest, write, and contribute material for Teach 3.11 through the form at the bottom of this page. We can receive annotations in any language, preferably with an accompanying translation.

The useful annotated citation for the Teach 3.11 project consists of a bibliographic entry and one or two paragraphs totaling 200-300 words that 1) summarize the gist of the source and how it is situated in the field, 2) evenhandedly provide context as to how it contributes to a historical understanding of 3.11, and 3) indicate the reading level (high school, undergraduate, graduate levels). If this is a book, please indicate the relevant chapters. The contributing annotator’s name will be listed.

Please suggest keywords to tag in the Notes submission box. We will mainly direct our editorial attention to cleaning up citation styles or grammar, but we may also edit for conciseness and clarity (in such cases where meaning(s) may be in question, we confirm with the annotator before posting). Please direct questions to teach3eleven [at] gmail.com. Thank you.

For more guidance, please refer to our existing annotated citations, or look at the brief examples below. You can also click here for guidance on citation styles.

SAMPLES (Full versions of these are posted separately.):

Clancey, Gregory. 2006. Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930. University of California Press.

Earthquake Nation provides crucial historical context for understanding more recent outbreaks of “Japanese seismicity” (Kobe 1995, Tohoku 2011). Recipient of the 2007 Sidney Edelstein Award from the Society for the History of Technology, this book eloquently unpacks and lays out the complicated interactions among seismology, architecture, engineering, culture, politics, and the living earth itself, during a specific and particularly dynamic period in Japanese history. Clancey’s analysis is multi-faceted, but in part, it examines the tensions between Western and Japanese knowledge of seismicity and architecture, shows how “universal” Western engineering did not translate well to the Japanese local context, and demonstrates how the results became taken up by nationalistic and imperialistic discourses in Japan. –Tyson Vaughan

Tags: Japan, earthquakes, politics, history, technology, science

Perrow, Charles. 1999. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Princeton University Press.

This classic of organizational sociology doubles as the cornerstone of a genre sometimes dubbed “disaster studies” and presents crucial insights for scholars of technological accidents and disasters, regardless of their primary discipline. Perrow’s thesis about “system accidents” occuring in tightly coupled and complexly interactive systems helps facilitate an understanding of the combination of past so-called trivial and the current catastrophic accidents at the Fukushima reactors. For example, Perrow describes untoward interactions between unrelated components due simply to physical proximity (such as the location of the spent fuel pools on the upper floors of the same buildings housing the GE Mark 1 containment vessels) and the crucial role of informational opacity (the inability to know the actual state of the system or its parts due to unreliable sensors or inaccessible components). Chapters 1 and 2 offer detailed descriptions of actual reactor incidents, particularly Three Mile Island. Reading level: advanced undergraduate. –Tyson Vaughan

tags: high-risk technologies, normal accidents, organizational sociology, Perrow, Three Mile Island, TMI