Pedro de la Torre III 4/26/2013 Experiments in Method delatp@rpi.edu

1. Contaminated Futures: Caring for the Future and the Hanford Nuclear ReservationNuclear Reservation Pedro de la Torre III 4/26/2013 Experiments in Method delatp@rpi.edu

2. Overview Hanford Nuclear Reservation (WA) began as a plutonium production facility for U.S. nuclear weapons complex during WWII Seventy year legacy of toxic and radioactive contamination, including intentional release of dangerous radionuclides

3. Overview Investigate the politics, history, and ethical reasoning surrounding site Explore environmental and intergenerational justice issues surrounding nuclear waste & contamination

4. Overview Complex stakeholder process involved in governing Hanford cleanup Given the degree of soil and groundwater contamination and the long half-lives of the contaminants, ethical obligations to current and future generations are negotiated implicitly or explicitly in Hanford cleanup

5. Research Problems • How are future imaginaries generated in the present, and how do they affect the politics and governance of nuclear waste and remediation? • How are intergenerational ethics negotiated in debates about environmental remediation and nuclear waste? Overview

6. Ethics: • Obligation? • "Discount?" • Philosophy (e.g., utilitarian) • Basis for Recognition • Specificity • Scale: • Temporal • Geographical • Specificity • Analogies (spaces of experience): • Scale (time and space) • Events • Narratives • References • Continuities: • Technoscientific • Sociocultural • Territorial • Government/political • Ecological • Of Knowledge • Discontinuities: • Technoscientific • Sociocultural • Territorial • Government/political • Ecological • Of Knowledge • Representations: • Subject positioning? (e.g., "generations") • Media (e.g., images, tables, imagined scenarios, etc.) • Rhetorical strategies • Specificity • Stake innoculation • Speaking for or about future generations? • Dissemination • Method (e.g., prediction based on extrapolation of current statistical trends): • Nature of truth claim: • Procedures (e.g., experimentation) • Data • Political/power/governance implications: • Authority • Regulatory/Legal tie-in • What controversies is it implicated in? • How does it connect/challenge dominant discourses/consensuses? • How does it construct the present? • Implicate change of priorities/areas of concern • "Type?" (e.g., security, transition, development, risk, etc.)      Overview So, what is a ‘future Imaginary’ anyway? Connotes formation of ‘mental (& sociocultural) images,’ not ‘unreal’

7. Social Temporalities Overview This work explores the complex relationships between history, memory, the “present,” expectations, and prediction in governance and the making of spaces. This work will interact with at least three key literatures in the social sciences: Social temporalities Environment, Nature, & Risk Subjects: Ethics, Rights, and Representation • Adam M. Hedgecoe, Erik Fisher, Cynthia Selin, and David H. Guston. 2007. “Anticipatory Governance of Nanotechnology: Foresight, Engagement, and Integration.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, third edition, 979–1000. Cambridge: The MIT Press. • Anderson, B, and P Adey. 2012. “Future Geographies.” Environment and Planning A 44 (7): 1529–1535. • Bender, J, and David E. Wellbery, ed. 1991. Chronotypes: The Construction of Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press. • Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2003. “Building a Marker of Nuclear Warning.” In Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, 183–204. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. • Comaroff, John L. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination. Boulder: Westview Press. • Dalsgaard, Steffen. 2012. “Fieldwork or ‘event-Work’?” In Anthropological Temporalities: Methods and Ontology of Multi-Temporal Ethnography. San Francisco, CA. • Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. • Fortun, Kim. 2000. “Remebering Bhopal, Re-figuring Liability.” Interventions 2 (2): 187–198. • Guyer, Jane I. 2007. “Prophecy and the Near Future :” 34 (3): 409–421. doi:10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.409.American. • Hedgecoe, Adam M., and Paul A. Martin. 2007. “Genomics, STS, and the Making of Sociotechnical Futures.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, third edition, 818–839. Cambridge: The MIT Press. • Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the past: power and the production of history. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press.

8. Environment, Nature, & Risk Overview Writings in this category explore the often dangerous aspects of sociotechnical systems, the distribution of “environmental” risks, the concepts through which “nature” or the “environment” is or should be understood, and the ways that these topics shape various socialities, knowledges, and politics. This work will interact with at least three key literatures in the social sciences: Social temporalities Environment, Nature, & Risk Subjects: Ethics, Rights, and Representation • Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press Books. • Dunlap, Riley E., and Fredrick H. Buttel, ed. 2002. Sociological Theory and the Environment: Classical Foundations, Contemporary Insights. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. • Fortun, Kim. 2001. Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. • Gusterson, Hugh. 2000. “How Not to Construct a Radioactive Waste Incinerator.” Science, Technology & Human Values 25 (3) (July): 332–351. • Hanson, RD. 2001. “Half Lives of Reagan’s Indian Policy: Marketing Nuclear Waste to American Indians.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25 (1): 21–44. • Hecht, Gabrielle. 2012. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. Cambridge: MIT press. • Mascarenhas, Michael. 2012. “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern Ontario, Canada.” • Masco, Joseph. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. • Murphy, Michelle. 2008. “Chemical Regimes of Living.” Environmental History 13 (4): 695–703. • ———. 2011. “Time in the Data of Cholera.” • Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton [N.J.]: Princeton University Press. • Smith, N. 2008. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. 3rd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press. • Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

9. Subjects: Ethics, Rights, and Representation Overview These works explore not only the study of ethical practice and imaginaries, but also the relation between the ethical, political, and legal; the recognition and representation of subjects, particularly “distant” ones; and the recognition of injury, harm, or suffering. This work will interact with at least three key literatures in the social sciences: Social temporalities Environment, Nature, & Risk Subjects: Ethics, Rights, and Representation • Adam M. Hedgecoe, Erik Fisher, Cynthia Selin, and David H. Guston. 2007. “Anticipatory Governance of Nanotechnology: Foresight, Engagement, and Integration.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, third edition, 979–1000. Cambridge: The MIT Press. • Anderson, B, and P Adey. 2012. “Future Geographies.” Environment and Planning A 44 (7): 1529–1535. • Bender, J, and David E. Wellbery, ed. 1991. Chronotypes: The Construction of Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press. • Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2003. “Building a Marker of Nuclear Warning.” In Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, 183–204. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. • Comaroff, John L. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination. Boulder: Westview Press. • Dalsgaard, Steffen. 2012. “Fieldwork or ‘event-Work’?” In Anthropological Temporalities: Methods and Ontology of Multi-Temporal Ethnography. San Francisco, CA. • Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. • Fortun, Kim. 2000. “Remebering Bhopal, Re-figuring Liability.” Interventions 2 (2): 187–198. • Guyer, Jane I. 2007. “Prophecy and the Near Future :” 34 (3): 409–421. doi:10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.409.American. • Hedgecoe, Adam M., and Paul A. Martin. 2007. “Genomics, STS, and the Making of Sociotechnical Futures.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, third edition, 818–839. Cambridge: The MIT Press. • Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the past: power and the production of history. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press.

10. Study Components Methods Field Sites • Ethnography • Semi-structured interviews • Participant observation • Attending events • Purposive & snowball sampling • Discourse Analysis • Richland, WA • Primary site of fieldwork, borders the Hanford Nuclear Reservation • Host to most stakeholder meetings and similar events • Near the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory • Other sites of interests, such as implicated American Indian reservation, relatively close by • Washington, DC • Short visits • Interviews with NGO, Policy, and Regulatory actors • Access to relevant events

11. Study Components • Attending Hanford Advisory Board Meetings • Semi-structured interviews • Attend meetings of relevant organizations & movements • Examine archives • Hanford site tours • Attend community meetings & events • Attend relevant hearings and events in Washington, DC and beyond • Activities and Questions

12. Study Components Environmental Groups Scientists and Engineers Federal Government Officials First Nations Government Officials & Activists Downwinders & Allies Labor Unions & Related Groups State Government Officials Contractors • Kinds of Subjects

13. Continuing problems and controversies over threats that the site presents, including: • Leaking radwaste tanks • Threat of tank explosions • Ecological costs of remediation activities • Pace of cleanup • Vitrification plant • “Downwinders” are still in litigation for compensation, and the link between their exposures and their illnesses is controversial • Current & future remediation efforts Why Study Hanford Now?

14. Context of austerity and “late industrialism” • Broader controversies over nuclear waste & nuclear energy • Widening gap between sustainability discourse, and the intergenerational ethics it implies, and ecological legacies Why Study Hanford Now

15. Plan of Work Schedule

16. Plan of Work Dissemination

17. About Me I am a first year PhD student at RPI’s Science and Technology Studies Department. Before that, I completed an M.A. in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. My areas of interest include nuclear waste and politics, disaster studies, social theory, and temporality. Email: delatp@rpi.edu Credits & Bio Image credits: stopnewnukes, EMSL, PNNL - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, & idyllopus