Choose Your Desired Option(s)
The purpose of this task is to engage with questions of whose expertise gets heard and why. What types of power are associated with the different types of expertise and what are the implications of these differences in power? Below are links to three sources of information on the nuclear testing that states conducted over several decades across the Pacific. The task is to read and watch these different forms of expertise and answer the associated questions.
1. Scientific expertise
Link: https://moruroa-files.org/en/investigation/moruroa-files
Questions:
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What forms of authority do the website’s claims rest on?
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What type of knowledge is produced in the Moruroa Files?
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Does this website reproduce or challenge the technostrategic discourse that Carol Cohn identifies in the core reading?
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Do you find this expertise convincing and why?
2. Lived experience
Link: Pacific Women Speak Out: A report made up of testimony from Pacific women from 1998. https://assets.website-files.com/5b43f3f705b1ce380ccbdaed/5bd635b5019ddf29da2e9b0e_Pacific%20Women%20Speak%20Out.pdf
Read Chapter 2. For the Good of Mankind by Darlene Keju-Johnson and Chapter 3 Marshall Islands Learning from Rongelap’s Pain by Lijon Eknilang.
Questions:
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What is the source of the expertise of the authors of this report?
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In what ways does the Talei Luscia Mangioni core reading provide a broader context for these testimonies?
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How does this contrast with the claims to expertise in the Morurua Files website?
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What type of knowledge and expertise do you hear most in nuclear policy? Why do you think this is?
3. Poetry and the arts
Link: History Project, a recording of poet Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner at the Southbank Centre London.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIIrrPyK0eU
Questions:
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What form of knowledge is being expressed here?
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What do you think Jetn̄il-Kijiner is saying about translating between different forms of knowledge?
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How does this work build on the archive of Pacific Poetry in the core reading by Rebecca H. Hogue and Anaïs Maurer?
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How does this work relate to a feminist view of the nuclear world?
Content Attributes
| Link to Resource | |
| Video Url | |
| Topic / Subject Matter | Deterrence, Disarmament, Nuclear Weapons |
| Skillset | Critical Thinking, Cross-cultural Understanding |
| Lens / Approach / Method | Feminism |
| Download Category | Educational |
| Content Tag | |
| Activity Type | |
| Audiences | College, High School |
| 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 | No |
| Divisible Explanation | |
| Recommended Reading |
Core Readings Cohn, Carol (1987) ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 (4): 687-718. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174209, also freely available several places online, including here: file:///C:/Users/hgs00106/Downloads/eScholarship%20UC%20item%2083k4763m.pdf Hogue, Rebecca H. and Anaïs Maurer (2022) ‘Pacific Women's Anti-Nuclear Poetry: Centring Indigenous Knowledges’, International Affairs 98 (4): 1267–1288. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiac120, or at: https://www.academia.edu/82635412/Pacific_womens_anti_nuclear_poetry_centring_Indigenous_knowledges Mangioni, Talei Luscia (2022) ‘The Ocean is our Mat’, e-flux Architecture. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/half-life/507122/the-ocean-is-our-mat/ Activity Resources: Moruroa Files, Investigation into French nuclear tests in the Pacific. Available at: https://moruroa-files.org/en/investigation/moruroa-files Keju-Johnson, Darlene (1998) ‘For the Good of Mankind’, Chapter 2 and Lijon Eknilang ‘Marshall Islands Learning from Rongelap’s Pain’, Chapter 3 in Pacific Women Speak Out for independence and denuclearisation, Pacific Connections. Available at: https://assets.website-files.com/5b43f3f705b1ce380ccbdaed/5bd635b5019ddf29da2e9b0e_Pacific%20Women%20Speak%20Out.pdf Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Kathy (2012) ‘History Project’ at the Southbank Centre for London 2012 Poetry Parnassus. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIIrrPyK0eU Further Readings Barker, Holly M. (2004) ‘Ethnography and a Marshallese Narrative of History’, Chapter 4 in Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World, Thomson Wadsworth. Hogue, Rebecca H. (2021) ‘Nuclear Normalizing and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s “Dome Poem”’, Amerasia Journal 47 (2): 208-229. Schwartz, Jessica (2021) ‘Radioactive Citizenship: Voices of a Nation’, Chapter 1 in Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences, Duke University Press. |
Learning Objectives |
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