Mediating Disaster: Shaping Perceptions of Risk, Environment, and Ways Forward

Author

Nicole Cote, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

6-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

English

Advisor

Matthew K. Gold

Committee Members

Ashley Dawson

Joan Richardson

Subject Categories

Communication Technology and New Media | Environmental Studies | Film and Media Studies | History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Science and Technology Studies | Visual Studies

Keywords

media, public knowledge, natural hazards, risk, data visualization, visual culture

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the historical and contemporary entanglements of media, technology, and cultural work that impact how individuals in hazard-prone areas are guided to look ahead to a future disaster. In reviewing media that aim to serve as public information on natural hazards, as well as the work that underlies them, this project takes as its subject three narratives of environmental crisis in the North American West, focusing in particular on the mid-twentieth century to today. Serving as case studies into risk, preparedness, and mitigation, the chapters of this dissertation examine the media and knowledge work surrounding wildfire in Colorado, an imminent earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, and flood control in Greater Los Angeles. This dissertation analyzes the taxonomical underpinnings and logics of risk media, the ways preparedness practices encouraged by digital media serve as value-making work, and how physical maps and conceptual mappings of disaster mitigation shape place and possible futures. These modalities of knowledge production, grounded in the idea of being at risk, become part of culture and are made both for and with their audiences. They suggest how planetary phenomena should be understood. Given the Earth’s increasingly hazard-prone future for humans and non-humans alike, this project finds significance in questioning what it has meant to know one’s risk and get ready for oncoming disaster, and the stakes of such mediations.

Recommended Citation

Cote, Nicole, "Mediating Disaster: Shaping Perceptions of Risk, Environment, and Ways Forward" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6263