How We Have Come to Live with Nuclear Risks and Threats: Post-Fukushima Reflections on Transnational Nuclear History | Kyoko Sato, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Soraya Boudia

About the Event: The talk will feature the 2022 volume, Living in a Nuclear World: From Fukushima to Hiroshima (Routledge), and its three co-editors, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (U. Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne), Soraya Boudia (U. Paris Cité), and Kyoko Sato (Stanford). The book provides unique post-Fukushima reflections on nuclear history and politics from a long-term and transnational perspective, asking how nuclear technology has shaped the world we live in and how we have come to live with it and the peril it presents. A product of sustained, multi-year and interdisciplinary intellectual exchange among scholars on nuclear technology from different disciplinary (e.g., history, anthropology, STS, philosophy, nuclear sciences) and national (e.g., US, Japan, France) backgrounds, the volume tackles the global nuclear history backwards: how Fukushima shed new light on past efforts to spread and control nuclear technology. Through examining the politics of knowledge, technical innovation, and narratives, as well as the development of international standards and governance frameworks, it explores how we have managed nuclear violence and disasters, envisioned a bright future with the nuclear technology, and trivialized and normalized threats from the nuclear. The volume covers a variety of empirical cases, including the relationships between the expertise on radiation’s health effects and aids for a-bomb survivors in Japan; the development of films to capture nuclear tests and exposures; colonialist and imperialist contexts that dictated the legal status of Micronesia as a test site; rhetoric of “nuclear apartheid”; the constitutive roles of institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and networks to monitor radioactive contamination; a conceptual shift in transnational nuclear waste management; different paradigms in global governance of nuclear hazards; implications of the influx of Western medicine for child survivors of Chernobyl; the tension and co-existence of catastrophic and optimistic visions of nuclear future; and emerging practices to memorialize Fukushima and other nuclear disasters. Chapter authors include leading scholars of nuclear history and politics such as Joseph Masco (Chicago), Kate Brown (MIT), John Krige (Georgia Tech), Angela Creager (Princeton), and Maria Rentetzi (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), and up-and-coming new researchers.

We believe that the volume contributes new insights on how we have come to where we are with nuclear technology, and this event will offer an opportunity for promising and meaningful discussion relevant to the preservation of human future — especially given the current energy crisis and the global nuclear order destabilized by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

About the Speakers:

Kyoko Sato is Associate Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. Her research examines technoscientific governance in Japan and the United States. She is currently working on a manuscript to examine Japan’s nuclear history through the dynamics among global and national governance approaches, transnational development of expertise on radiation, and civil society mobilization. She is also part of a project that compares Covid-19 policy responses in East Asia. She has published in journals including Science, Technology and Human Values; East Asian Science, Technology and Society; Theory and Society; and Journal of Science and Technology Studies (in Japanese) and book chapters on the Fukushima disaster in English and Japanese.

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, philosopher and historian of science is emeritus professor at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She is a member of the French Academy of Technology and of several ethics committees. She was the 2021 Sarton Medalist of the History of Science Society and the recipient of the Dexter Award for outstanding achievements in the History of Chemistry from ACS in 1994.  Her most recent publications include Temps-paysage. Pour une écologie des crises (2021) and Between Nature and Society. Biographies of Materials (2022).

Soraya Boudia is an STS scholar and professor of sociology at the Université Paris Cité. Her research focuses on the relationship between science and politics in the global environmental issues. She has extensively worked on the history of nuclear risks and toxicants governance. She has published with N. Jas, Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World (Berghann, 2014), and with A. N. H. Creager, S. Frickel, E. Henry, N. Jas, C. Reinhardt, J. A. Roberts, Residues, Rethinking Chemical Environment (Rutgers University Press, 2021). She is currently co-leading a national French research initiative on risk and crisis initiative on risk and crisis.

About the Discussants:

David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, a professor of political science, and an FSI senior fellow. He was co-director of CISAC from 1991 to 1997, and director of FSI from 1998 to 2003. His research focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, on science and technology in the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His book Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 11 best books of 1994, and it won the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. It has been translated into seven languages, most recently into Chinese. The Chinese translation is due to be published later in 2018. Holloway also wrote The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983) and co-authored The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment (1984). He has contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, and other scholarly journals.

Dan Zimmer completed his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research focuses on the implications that anthropogenic existential risk (x-risk) poses for some of the foundational categories of Western political thought, paying particular attention to the historical dimension of ongoing engagement and avoidance with the subject. His doctoral dissertation examined how the political debates inspired by the thermonuclear fallout crisis of the 1950s came to be reformulated in light of the growing public preoccupation with ecological x-risks such as global warming and nuclear winter beginning in the 1980s. His research at Stanford seeks to bring this historical analysis up to the present by tracking how the contemporary study of x-risk came to be formalized in the early 2000s in response to growing concerns about the prospect of machine superintelligence. Previously, Dan spent a year as a Boren Fellow studying the tactics used by the Gezi Park protestors in Istanbul, Turkey.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.