Search

Some events have such an impact on society that it is unclear whether the standard rules of political decision making still apply. This paper analyses the planning process of rebuilding Ground Zero as a case in which politics was unhinged and new procedures were invented on the spot. The politics of planning was not only about what should be done on the site, but also about the sort of procedure that should be followed to take a legitimate decision. The paper conceives of the political process as a sequence of staged performances and introduces a model that analyses policy processes in terms of discourse, dramaturgy and deliberation. It describes the rebuilding of Ground Zero as a case of an ‘unhappy performance’ in which, as the process continued, the wider publicly-shared determination to create a bold symbolic response to terrorism lost out to uninspired political-economic reasoning. It argues that this analysis of policy processes as performance deserves a much wider application as today's world is full of situations in which decisions are made in networks marked by unclear rules as to how to arrive at a legitimate decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unprecedented toxic release in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001 created one of the worst environmental disasters in US history, followed by a contentious and ongoing battle over the existence, etiology, and legitimation of World Trade Center-related illness. In this paper, I explore the enactment of epistemic authority by a complex array of stakeholders-government officials, scientists, physicians, environmentalists, advocates, journalists, and politicians-who have woven medical-scientific knowledge into their competing agendas and platforms. Despite the scientific validation of environmental dangers, the clinical documentation of illness and the epidemiological substantiation of links between environmental exposure and illness onset, the political-economic interests of federal, state, and local bodies have often been privileged over the protection of public health. 9/11 illness is a 'contested illness' enmeshed in politically charged disputes regarding the relationship of environmental toxins to disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution addresses the diverging discourses of the United States, France and Germany in reaction to the terrorist attacks of 2001 in New York and Washington, with a focus on gender. As a discourse analysis, it explores the ways in which the different narratives instantiate dichotomous conceptions of gender. It is argued that owing to the centrality of gendered constructions for identity, and owing to the mutually constitutive nature of the relation between identity and foreign policy, the comparative perspective adopted adds to the understanding of the disparities in enacting foreign policy between these three close transatlantic allies. Not only does this paper expose the contingency of the gendered underpinnings of the US, French and German high-level policy discourses that were constitutive of the early "war on terrorism" but it also shows how these stories matter. The three countries' foreign policy formulations in response to "9/11", particularly their respective choices between identifying the attacks as acts of war or crime, pursuit or rejection of regime change, and unilateralism and multilateralism, make explicit that the varying degrees of dichotomously gendered framings of identity are constitutively significant for foreign policy formulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) covered a large area of downtown New York City with dust and debris. This paper describes the testing of an analytical method designed to evaluate whether sampled dust contains dust that may have originated from the collapse of the WTC. Using dust samples collected from locations affected and not affected (referred to as ‘background’ locations) by the collapse, a scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis method was developed to screen for three materials that are believed to be present in large quantities in WTC dusts: slag wool, concrete, and gypsum. An inter-laboratory evaluation of the method was implemented by having eight laboratories analyze a number of ‘blind’ dust samples, consisting of confirmed background dust and confirmed background dust spiked with varying amounts of dust affected by the WTC collapse. The levels of gypsum and concrete in the spiked samples were indistinguishable from the levels in the background samples. Measurements of slag wool in dust demonstrated potential for distinguishing between spiked and background samples in spite of considerable within and between laboratory variability. Slag wool measurements appear to be sufficiently sensitive to distinguish dust spiked with 5% WTC-affected dust from 22 out of 25 background dust samples. Additional development work and inter-laboratory testing of the slag wool component will be necessary to improve the precision and accuracy of the method and reduce inter- and intra-laboratory variability from levels observed in the inter-laboratory evaluation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The horrific terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, left an indelible mark on perceptions of security and threat across the world. This paper uses Schwartz's (1992) value circumplex model to examine value change across matched high school and university student samples in Finland, questioned before and after the World Trade Center (WTC) and associated attacks. In Study 1 ( N=419), security values of adolescents were higher the day following the WTC attacks than before, but fell back toward pre-attack levels in the subsequent two samples. In contrast, levels of stimulation were lower following the terrorist incidents. In Study 2 ( N=222), security levels of students were also higher following the WTC attacks, but again were closer to pre-attack levels in a subsequent cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attack on the World Trade Center occurred less than a quarter of a mile from Pace University in Lower Manhattan. This paper represents a compilation of the recollection of the events of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath from the four senior staff members of the Counseling Center. Our purpose is to share our experiences and perspectives of these events from the point of view of the closest university to the attack. We will also share some of the ways in which we coped as a staff, how we helped the larger community to cope, and some of the lessons we learned from both a professional and personal point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cataclysm of September 11, 2001 created a universal reaction that the world would never be the same. Understandably, Washington unleashed a counterattack to find and extirpate the terrorists as an end in itself. But is terrorism essentially a senseless act of anarchy, or does it mask a malaise deeply held in various non-Western cultures? This paper contends that the horrendous events of September 11 precipitated a head-on clash of two competing worldviews and societal orders: Muslim Theism versus secularized Western Humanism. Meanwhile, the latter is in turn being challenged in a second set of competing worldviews, not at the former site of the World Trade Center but wherever the World Trade Organization meets. Those outside the fenced perimeter are calling for implementation of a very different view of reality. This new paradigm with its own emerging attributes-Holism-builds upon humanistic traditions and values, but extends to all societies and cultures, henceforth perceived as systemically interdependent, and embracing all forms of life in an ecological matrix. For the first time in human evolution, all peoples are simultaneously being transformed in the direction of a new worldview that is global in its inclusiveness, and novel and innovative in its behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a simplified approximate analysis of the overall collapse of the towers of World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. The analysis shows that if prolonged heating caused the majority of columns of a single floor to lose their load carrying capacity, the whole tower was doomed. Despite optimistic simplifying assumptions, the structural resistance is found to be an order of magnitude less than necessary for survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the abstract of the research paper 'Impact of the 9/11 Disaster on Blood Donations in the New York Area,' by R. Jones, et al, to be presented at the American Association of Blood Banks' 55th Annual Meeting on October 26-29, 2002.