Three+Abstracts+for+Panels_pedlt3

Contributors to this panel will speak of their own ethnographic encounters with desolate and dangerous spaces, and examine the material, geographical, and sociocultural processes that produce them. They will also examine the ways that these spaces come to be revalued, for example, through aesthetic, environmental, or ideological reclamation. Finally, contributors will speak to contesting and contested valuations of these spaces, and the ways that they come to be understood through the lens of danger, ungovernability, and freedom.
 * Wastelands and Badlands: The Politics of Value and Danger in Desolate Spaces**


 * **“Not a Place of Honor:” Land, Value, and Legacy at W.I.P.P. & Hanford**
 * At nuclear waste sites like the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, NM and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, very different processes of valuation, based on different kinds of limited land use, have been guiding long-term planning. At the former, a large system of markers designed to mark off the site from virtually all human uses is planned, following both a strong ethical imperative to warn future generations of the risks they might encounter and a desire to, through this “pilot” project, monumentalize the extraordinary care of the U.S. nuclear complex towards its long-lived wastes. At the latter, a range of uses is planned, included limited industrial uses, historical monuments, and various kinds of “ecological” and recreational uses. This paper will compare the future geographies of these sites, with a particular emphasis on the different roles of stakeholder governance, the legacy of settler colonialism and the “treadmill of destruction,” the limits of governability, and the political economies of their respective regions.

According to Mertonian norms and, often enough, the popular imagination, technoscience should be universal and communistic. Yet, technoscience has often helped to define nationalism or be defined by it in terms of practices and imaginaries. Nuclear weapons, for example, entailed huge national projects, immense (although often secret) nation sacrifices from those affected from the radioactive pollution their development and testing often entailed, and a sense of both global or regional dominance and, often enough, new forms of vulnerability. This panel will examined these uneasy relationships between nationalism—including post-colonial nationalisms—and technoscience through an ethnographic lens.
 * Technoscience for/of the Nation: The Uneasy Articulations of Technological and National Imaginaries**


 * **“I Maimed My Babe for that Nuclear Race:” (1) Biocitizenship and the Legacy of the Cold War**
 * Roughly seventy years after the first radioactive releases from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, affected individuals are continuing to advocate for forms of compensation and social services. Some, such as the “Cold War Patriots,” work towards forms of recognition, compensation, and mutual aid based upon the sacrifices they endured as miners or employees for the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Others, such as the “downwinders” that were exposed due in part to intentional releases of various radioactive substances from Hanford, are still fighting for compensation in court. This article, through an ethnographic engagement with these groups, will examine the lasting legacy of cold war and contemporary nuclear nationalism on emerging forms of biocitizenship in the U.S.
 * (1) Unknown author. “Downwinder Poem.” []. Accessed 3/28/2013.
 * (1) Unknown author. “Downwinder Poem.” []. Accessed 3/28/2013.

This panel will focus on the tensions between neoliberalism and inheritance by examining questions like: How does a rationality that focuses on responsibilization of individuals rationalize the transfer of wealth and/or debt between generations? What double binds are created by the justification of austerity—much of it affecting education, environmental protections, and healthcare for children and their families—through the use of an intergenerational ethics of debt avoidance?
 * The Sins of the Father: Legacy, Inheritance, and Neoliberalism**


 * **Austere Inheritance: Externalizing of Toxic and Radioactive Legacies in Neoliberal Intergenerational Ethics**
 * One of the central rhetorical strategies for legitimating austerity programs is stressing the importance of limiting the public debt that is transferred to future generations. As the House G.O.P. website notes, “Unless drastic actions are taken to reduce spending now and in the future, debt will dwarf growth and future generations will be less prosperous than those that preceded them.”(1) Yet, programs that have been slated for reduced spending include environmental remediation efforts, environmental monitoring, renewable energy, and other efforts to improve the air, water, and climate that future generations will inherit. Drawing on fieldwork at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state—one of the largest environmental remediation projects in the world—along with a discourse analysis of pro-austerity intergenerational rhetoric, this article will explore the neoliberal framing of inheritance and its consequences.
 * (1) []. Accessed 3/28/2013
 * (1) []. Accessed 3/28/2013