project+hopping+pedlt3

Pedro de la Torre III Experiments in Method 2/1/13   ** Project Hopping Memo ** -Proposals to institutionalize intergenerational concerns (like giving future generations standing in court, or a public defender for the future) -Government, industry, and NGO reports (and other forms of communication) -Tours of the site -Attending conferences, press conferences, advisory board meetings, & activist group meetings. Also visiting relevant museums. || -How are intergenerational ethics understood and used within debates over nuclear waste and environmental cleanup? -What kind of environmentalism (or environmental movement) can successfully deal with the issues presented by nuclear waste and cleanup? -What does the history of particular sites tell us about things like long-term stewardship, “future land use,” and “sacrifice zones?” -What kinds of ethical/legal/political relations are possible with absent subjects (future generations)? -What are the limits and opportunities presented by forms of participation relying on “stakeholders,” as compared, for example, to environmental justice? -What can these debates/cases tell us about the concept of “nature;” the role of temporality in the intersection politics, technoscience, and ethics; and the relationship between political economy, geography, and environmental justice || -Fukushima and the (probable) end of the Yucca Mountain Repository proposal, among other things, has introduced a great deal of uncertainty into the military-industrial-nuclear-complex -Nuclear power is still put forward, often enough by environmentalists, as a solution to global climate change -Ongoing and still controversial cleanup efforts of nuclear sites, which may increase as old power plants are decommissioned/new states take up or expand nuclear power/reprocessing || -Generally anti-nuclear power/weapons -Generally aghast at DoE/military history of involvement at these sites -Tend to view the problem as one that cannot be solved to anyone’s satisfaction, and involving difficult trade-offs -Somewhat skeptical of the ability (or appropriateness) of “stakeholder” participation alone to deal with fundamental environmental justice concerns (including intergenerational concerns, broken treaties, and economic/political structures) || -Hanford, WA -DC -Somewhere else? || I have no idea, but maybe: -NSF -Wenner Gren Foundation || -What competing notions of “risk” are at issue in debates and practices around Fracking? -What notions of intergenerational ethics are at play in these debates? Is it less of an issue here than in nuclear waste discourses, and, if so, why? -How has the industry managed to put almost all of the burden of proof, so to speak, on critics and affected communities? What cultural/discursive/institutional processes and practices allow this to happen? -Where does fracking fit into the larger history and future of energy use and resource (particularly fossil fuel) extraction? || -Rapid expansion of fracking -Local/regional concern, as Cuomo has yet to make a decision -Climate change impacts of expanded fossil fuel extraction || -Anti-fracking || -New York State -Rallies / meetings / press conferences -Possibly visits to affected communities in PA || -I have no idea || -Transcripts of speeches by politicians and others || -What does the casual, unreflective, and uncriticized use of this trope say about the way people in U.S. and other “first world” nations understand their place in the world, and life in the so-called “third world?” -What questions about crisis, chaos, and development/progress can this example help illuminate? -What critical potentials does this trope have? -How should we think about and investigate that which has been called: -Problematic long-term shift, even on some of the left, from politics of anti-colonial solidarity to a more paternalistic and anti-political “politics of care” -Problematic discourses and conceptualization of “third world” suffering, often as “bare life” or suggesting forms of neocolonial intervention to save postcolonial subjects from themselves -Perhaps suggests an inability to take on “1st world” susceptibility to disaster on its own terms || -Dislike the use of the tropes, although the point is not to keep people from using it, but rather promote reflection on how, as Ginsberg said, “all our language is taxed by war” (or, in this case, the legacy of colonialism) || -US media || -none(?) ||
 * ** Topical Area ** || **Data Sets** || **Social/Theoretical Question** || **Why Now?** || **Bias** || **Fields of Work?** || **Funders** ||
 * **// Radioactive Waste / Intergenerational Ethics //** || -Interviews & participant observation with/in affected communities, environmental cleanup scientists and engineers, government officials, activist/environmental groups and organizations, nuclear industry experts, cleanup workers, &journalists
 * **// Fracking //** || -Interviews with affected residents/workers, journalists covering the issue (or who should be covering the issue), community and environmental activists || -What is left out of popular discourses, particularly in the media, about the risks and effects of fracking? Why?
 * **// 3rd World Tropes and Disaster //** || -News reports
 * 1) Ideology
 * 2) Discursive formations
 * 3) Habitus (maybe)
 * 4) Dominant frames || -Increased use of the trope post-Katrina and Sandy