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What do we learn about nuclear politics if we take families and homes as our starting point? Feminists argue that the personal and the political are intertwined. Thus families and homes shape nuclear politics and are shaped by it – with some families and homes much more affected than others. The aim of these picture-based activities is to help you to critical reflect on how the domestic sphere and our intimate and family relationships are entangled with the nuclear world.
This learning activity consists of two main tasks. For the first, you will be asked to study images of Cold War-era fallout shelters and of mock-up homes from the Nevada test site. You will critically analyse these images before drawing your own family’s fallout shelter, and reflecting on what it reveals about your family life and about your conceptions of nuclear disaster.
For the second task, you will be asked to investigate images of the town of Oak Ridge in Tennessee, which produced uranium for the Manhattan Project; of housing in the adjacent Pacific islands of Ebeye and Kwajalein; and of refugee camps for those displaced by the nuclear accident in in Fukushima prefecture in Japan. After discussing a series of questions about these images, you will produce a collage to illustrate the real-world impact of nuclear technologies on homes and families.
Content Attributes
| Link to Resource | |
| Video Url | |
| Topic / Subject Matter | Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Weapons, Other |
| Skillset | Critical Thinking |
| Lens / Approach / Method | Decolonization, Feminism, Gender |
| Download Category | Educational |
| Content Tag | art, families, homes, nuclear harms |
| Activity Type | Art Prompt, Online module |
| Audiences | College |
| Minimum Number of Participants | |
| Maximum Number of Participants | |
| Group or Individual | Groups, Individuals |
| Recommended group size | |
| Number of Leaders | |
| Total Prep Time | |
| Total activity time | |
| Divisible | Yes |
| Divisible Explanation | This activity consists of two tasks, 'The Ideal Nuclear Family' and 'Mobile Homes' which could be separated into two class sessions if required. The tasks should be understaken in the set order, however, in order to drive home the gulf between imagined and actual impacts. |
| Recommended Reading |
Core reading (*especially relevant to these activities): Hirshberg, Lauren (2022) ‘Introduction’, especially pp.1-35, in Suburban Empire: Cold War Militarization in the US Pacific, University of California Press. Available at: https://content.ucpress.edu/title/9780520289161/9780520289161_intro.pdf * Kimura, Aya Hirata (2016) ‘“Moms with Radiation Brain”: Gendered Food Policing in the Name of Science’, Chapter 1 in Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima, Duke University Press. Ebook chapter available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11317hs.7 Northcutt, Susan Stoudinger (1999) ‘Women and the Bomb: Domestication of the Atomic Bomb in the United States’, International Social Science Review 74 (3-4): 129-139. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41887009 *Full details of web resources for these activities: Dooney, Phyllis B. (2012) ‘Japan’s Nuclear Evacuees’, Boston.com, The Big Picture, March 9. Available at http://archive.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/03/japans_nuclear_refugees.html Kwajalein Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands (no date) ‘Living on Kwajalein - Housing’. Available at: https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/kwa/0liv_hou.html Moscia, Lorenzo (2019) ‘Marshall Islands - Ebeye 2019’. Available at https://lorenzomoscia.com/marshall-islands-ebeye/ Pruitt, Sarah (2020) ‘At Cold War Nuclear Fallout Shelters, These Foods Were Stocked for Survival’, History. Available at: https://www.history.com/news/cold-war-fallout-shelter-survival-rations-food Steve (no date) ‘ Blown To Smithereens: The Strange Story Of Survival Town’, WebUrbanist: Architecture, Art, Design, and Built Environments. Available at: https://weburbanist.com/2009/11/08/blown-to-smithereens-the-secret-story-of-survival-town/ Taylor, Alan (2012) ‘The Secret City’, The Atlantic, June 25. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2012/06/the-secret-city/100326/Selected further readings, to follow-up on these activities: Brown, Kate (2013) ‘The City Plutonium Built’ Chapters 5 in Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, Oxford University Press. Freeman, Lindsey A. (2019) This Atom Bomb in Me, Redwood Press. Jacobs, Robert A. (2022) ‘Falling Apart Inside’, chapter 3 in Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha, Yale University Press. Lichtman, Sarah A. (2006) ’Do-It-Yourself Security: Safety, Gender, and the Home Fallout Shelter in Cold War America’, Journal of Design History 19 (1): 39–55.
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