MATERIAL POLITICS OF NUCLEAR

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Kansai region of Japan in 2016, this research draws on sensibilities from the fields of feminist science and technology studies (STS), material semiotics and institutional ethnography to explore people’s experiences of everyday eating in the aftermath of the 2011 Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The project has resulted in a dissertation and other publications, and is currently being drafted into further publications for academic and general audiences. The dissertation, entitled Eating a nuclear disaster: A vital institutional ethnography of everyday eating in the aftermath of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster was recognized as an Exceptional Doctoral Thesis by the University of Otago’s Division of Humanities in 2018, placing it in the top 10% of theses examined. Contributing to scholarly discussion in the fields of STS and feminist theory, the dissertation advanced conceptualizations of everyday power in the face of environmental health problems and developed the method “vital institutional ethnography.” In addition to its theoretical and methodological contributions, the dissertation highlighted how shame was used as a tool to silence deliberation in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster, and how overcoming this silencing required that people cultivate or discover refugia for thinking together. These refugia allowed people to find opportunities to respond to the possible presence of TEPCO’s radionuclides in their everyday lives—as opposed to ignoring the materiality of the nuclear disaster as dominant discourses were pressuring them to do.

For this line of research, I have been working on a collaborative research project mapping the expansion of nuclear imperialism and nuclear colonialism from the 1940s to today. In addition, I am working on a book manuscript entitled Eating a Nuclear Disaster: Food, Science and Silence After Fukushima Daiichi. The book draws on feminist and anticolonial STS to develop the concept of nuclear silencing and engage with current debates in:

• public health – discussing the problems with using shame as a public health tool for handling complex socio-technical issues.
• energy policy – asking, given its dependency on nuclear silencing and nuclear colonialism, is nuclear power really “green” (both environmentally and socially sustainable)?
• anticolonial science – asking, what could an anticolonial nuclear science look like?