Escape from New York
Infrastructure is a marvel, meeting our basic needs and enabling lives of astounding ease and productivity that would have been unimaginable just a century ago.
Yet across the U.S. and elsewhere, infrastructure systems are suffering from systemic neglect and the effects of climate change, with communities that are already marginalized often bearing the brunt of these failures. Before the film, Olin College of Engineering Prof. Deb Chachra will discuss how John Carpenter’s visionary dystopian nightmare illuminates this crisis and its solutions.
About the Film
John Carpenter's 1981 visionary dystopian nightmare is set in the terrifying future of 1997. When a hijacked Air Force One crashes on the island prison of Manhattan, President Donald Pleasance finds himself amongst murderers, terrorists, thieves and drug dealers. Eye-patched mercenary Snake Plissken (Carpenter regular Kurt Russell) gets tapped for the rescue mission, with a 24-hour deadline before the government sets off the explosives implanted in his neck. With Isaac Hayes, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine and Harry Dean Stanton.
About the Speaker
Deb Chachra is a professor at Olin College of Engineering with a technical background in engineering physics and materials science. She is also the author of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World (Riverhead/Torva, 2023), and she writes, thinks, builds, and speaks widely on themes of technology and society. As one of the earliest faculty at Olin College, Dr. Chachra has been deeply engaged in all aspects of undergraduate engineering education, including the design of learning experiences and programs, as well as educational research.
Dr. Chachra’s work and ideas have been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Autodesk Foundation, and others, and she received an NSF CAREER Award for research on engineering education. She has written for outlets including The Atlantic and Nature and a regular column for the American Society for Engineering Education’s Prism magazine, as well as her own long-running online newsletter, Metafoundry. Dr. Chachra’s technical background is in engineering physics and materials science, with a focus on biological systems; prior to joining the faculty of Olin College, she was a postdoctoral associate at MIT.
