Delineating+a+Project_pedlt3


 * Delineating a Project **

1. ** Timespaces of Nuclear Waste. ** Using the orienting concepts of “timespace” (May and Thrift 2001) and “chronotypes” (Bender and Wellbery 1991), I will look at the ways that multiple and uneven temporalities/geographies and narrative constructions of time shape the controversies and conundrums surrounding nuclear waste and cleanup efforts. So, for example, some of the key questions implied in this “about” could be: a. How is urgency constructed and negotiated by the various actors in these debates? b. How do existing deliberative processes deal with thorny issues that involve multiple and incommensurable timescales? c. How are intergenerational relations deployed within these controversies, and implied by existing policies, practices, and knowledges?

2. ** Rethinking Environmentalism. ** Hanford and other large-scale environmental cleanup sites, perhaps particularly of the nuclear variety, seem to pose several interesting about what kind of environmentalism is needed in the coming decades. As some have pointed out, there is no “going back” to a pristine nature at Hanford (nor, really, anywhere else), and yet, this is still a prevalent theme in many versions of environmentalism. Nor, as Hanford also illustrates well, is an ecology when thought of ahistorically (involving “natural cycles” that need to be “balanced”) necessarily helpful, at least in terms of figuring out how to live with a “nature” that is (and really has always been) just as susceptible to change as “non-nature” (culture). Nor is it always even helpful to think of the challenges that these sites present as “environmental,” since it would tend to obscure the ways that the risks they present respect no neat divisions. Using concepts like “socionature,” the question might be less how to partition off “nature” from human influence, but how to help produce a better world for the long term. It may well involve doing more, both in terms of altering landscapes—something we are constantly doing, and cannot really help doing, so should be doing more carefully and consciously—and radical “social” change.


 * 3. ** ** Intergenerational ethics. ** This “about” would ask what kinds of ethics are put to work—both tacitly and explicitly—in the controversies, knowledge practices, institutional processes, and technologies/designs/artifacts surrounding nuclear waste and cleanup. Among other things, it would look at where such relations are disavowed as irrelevant, future generations as (what in some theoretical traditions is called) implicated actors, and whether we can in some cases talk about the subject formation of future generations (how are future generations turned into ethical subjects to whom we have obligations).

Bender, J, and David E. Wellbery, ed. 1991. //Chronotypes: The Construction of Time//. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

May, Jon, and Nigel Thrift, ed. 2001. //Timespace: Geographies of Temporality//. New York: Routledge.