With a focus on the themes of space and memory, public health and public safety, trauma and conflict, and politics and social change and an interdisciplinary group of expert contributors, New York After 9/11, looks back over the seventeen years since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City to discuss key issues that emerged in the wake of the attack, some immediately and others in the years that followed. These issues included PTSD among first responders; conflicts and design challenges of rebuilding the World Trade Center site, the memorial, and the museum; surveillance of Muslim communities; power struggles among public safety agencies; and the development of technologies for faster building evacuations. As New York After 9/11 vividly illustrates, each of these issues emerged with its own challenges, conflicts, and trajectories and reveal recovery after disaster to be a process that is complex, multivalent, and ongoing. Professor Susan Opotow, the book’s initiator and co-editor, discusses the contributions of New York After 9/11 to our knowledge of long-term aftereffects of cataclysmic urban trauma, noting adverse aftereffects that could be prevented in future disasters.

Presented by:
Susan Opotow, PhD

Susan Opotow, PhD is a professor at City University of New York. Her research examines the psychology of injustice and conflict, focusing on exclusionary and inclusionary change. An APA Fellow, she heads the PhD Program in Critical Social/Personality Psychology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and has served as 2018 Chair of the APA Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest, editor of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, and president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

Learning Objectives:
1. conflict, challenges, and changes that ripple from “time zero,” the traumatic event, occur over an extended period time – days, weeks, months, years, and decades;
2. the extended period afterwards is complex, multivalent, and ongoing; and
3. effective recovery initiatives and efforts require cooperation among diverse groups, including various community, professional, and governmental groups at both smaller and larger levels of analysis (i.e., local, state, national).

References:
The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2011, Aug 12). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office,

Amer, M. M., & Bagasra, A. (2013). Psychological research with Muslim Americans in the age of Islamophobia: Trends, challenges, and recommendations. American Psychologist, 68(3), 134.

Crane, M. A., Levy-Carrick, N. C., Crowley, L., Barnhart, S., Dudas, M., Onuoha, U., Globina, Y., Haile, W., Shukla, G., & Ozbay, F. (2014). The response to September 11: a disaster case study. Annals of global health, 80(4), 320-331.

Sagalyn, L. B. (2016). Power at Ground Zero: politics, money, and the remaking of Lower Manhattan. Oxford University Press.

Sturken, M. (2015). The 9/11 memorial museum and the remaking of ground zero. American Quarterly, 67(2), 471-490.