Description

You are a journalist for TIME magazine. 

You have noticed the lack of human- or victim-centred perspectives on nuclear weapons. So often you are encountering strategic military positions, state-centred frames, or the expert opinion of scientists, diplomats and officers. 

You want to design a magazine cover that draws the reader's attention to the people affected by nuclear weapons. These people can be living or dead, they may be from past or present, and they may be from near or far. Perhaps they were victims of Hiroshima or Nagaskai. Perhaps they were impacted by radiation as a result of mining, production, or testing. 

You must decide how you will represent this issue:

What will you include? What will you exclude? What will you highlight? What will you background?

Be ready to present:

(1) a central image or illustration (you may find this online or create your own)

(2) an accompanying headline

(3) a justification for your choices

Learning Objectives

• Throughout this module you will encounter a range of feminist voices and experience the nuclear world as embodied and sensory, intimate and everyday. By the end of the module you will understand how gender intersects with other power relations to shape the nuclear world. You will critically evaluate different feminist approaches and come to your own conclusions.

Description

How might your role in the family or household influence your interaction with the nuclear world? Feminists have drawn attention to how these roles are often stratified by gender, linked to gender segregation and inequality in the workplace and sustained by powerful cultural norms around motherhood. The writing activities that follow aim to help you analyse critically how women’s association with homemaking and mothering shapes their entry into nuclear industries or anti-nuclear activism.

There are four writing tasks associated with this activity. The first asks you to unpack the role of gender in women’s anti-government activism, and reactions to it, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. The second task is a critical analysis of ‘maternalist’ motivations at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK. The third task asks for short answers in response to questions about the variety of roles women played at Oak Ridge, as part of the Manhattan Project. Finally, you will assess how ideas and imagery have been mobilised by the organisation 'Mothers for Nuclear'. 

Learning Objectives

• recognise the range of subject positions women have occupied in relation to nuclear technologies
• recognise the intersection of gender with racialised and other hierarchies in the production of these different subject positions
• identify how motherhood tropes have been mobilised both for and against those technologies, and both by women and against them
• evaluate the impact of motherhood tropes on nuclear industries and on women's lives

Description

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.  

Learning Objectives

• identify the disparities between dominant cultural imaginaries of nuclear harms on households and the actual harms
• evaluate the potential impact of nuclear harm on your own home and wider community
• recognise the particular impacts on different communities' homes
• evaluate whose homes and families have been most affected, how and why

Description

In this first task, imagine you are an investigative journalist and you have been asked to interview a nuclear expert. 

These people can be living or dead, they may be from the past or present, and they may be from near or far. You may want military expertise, lived experience, scientific insight, academic contribution or an activist’s voice. Think about the people you encountered in the core readings and spend some time researching online before you come to your decision.

You must consider:

Who will you choose and why? What do you want to learn, understand, or highlight? 

Be ready to present:

(1) three to five questions that you would ask your chosen interviewee 

(2) justification for your choice of interviewee 

(3) justification for your chosen questions

Discuss as a group: are there any patterns that have emerged in terms of the people you have chosen or the questions you will ask?

Learning Objectives

• The aim of these activities is to encounter and evaluate different forms of nuclear expertise. Feminism tells us that knowledge is not neutral but political, shaped by gender, race, and class. Some forms of knowledge are valued over others and some people are heard whilst others are silenced. These tasks will help you to identify and challenge the knowledge hierarchies in the nuclear field.

Description

An excellent compliment to Carol Cohn's article, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of the Defense Intellectual," in this activity you will engage with the sounds of nuclear expertise. Feminism encourages us to critically reflect on the criteria we use to judge whether someone’s voice and speech are authoritative and convincing. While some ways of speaking about nuclear weapons have become strongly associated with rationality, impartiality and scientific expertise, others have been silenced and side-lined as emotional, partisan and idealistic. Gender and racial hierarchies play a role in this process. In this activity, you will develop your own opinion on the sound of nuclear expertise.

Please download the PDF for the Sounds of Nuclear Expertise activity. In the PDF, you can click on five audio clips. While you listen, pay attention to all characteristics of the clip that influence your opinion of the speaker and content (i.e., the gender of the speaker, their voice, their tone, their language, what they are speaking about). 

Learning Objectives

• The aim of this activity is to encounter and critically evaluate different forms of nuclear expertise. Feminism tells us that knowledge is not neutral but political, shaped by things like gender, race, and class. Some forms of knowledge are valued over others and some people are heard whilst others are silenced. These tasks will help you to identify and challenge the knowledge hierarchies in the nuclear field.

Description

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:

• What forms of authority do the website’s claims rest on? 

• What type of knowledge is produced in the Moruroa Files? 

• Does this website reproduce or challenge the technostrategic discourse that Carol Cohn identifies in the core reading?

• 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:

• What is the source of the expertise of the authors of this report? 

• In what ways does the Talei Luscia Mangioni core reading provide a broader context for these testimonies? 

• How does this contrast with the claims to expertise in the Morurua Files website? 

• 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:

• What form of knowledge is being expressed here? 

• What do you think Jetn̄il-Kijiner is saying about translating between different forms of knowledge? 

• How does this work build on the archive of Pacific Poetry in the core reading by Rebecca H. Hogue and Anaïs Maurer?

• How does this work relate to a feminist view of the nuclear world?

Learning Objectives

• The aim of this activity is to encounter and critically evaluate different forms of nuclear expertise. Feminism tells us that knowledge is not neutral but political, shaped by things like gender, race, and class. Some forms of knowledge are valued over others and some people are heard whilst others are silenced. These tasks will help you to identify and challenge the knowledge hierarchies in the nuclear field.

Description

Please note you may be encountering graphic or disturbing accounts of bodily harm. 

The "Irradiated Bodies'' activity has two parts. Part 1 invites students to imagine how they would react to a nuclear attack. Part 2 encourages students to critically reflect on the political dimension in representations of bodies in materials on responses to radiation emergencies. For Part 1, the instructor needs to print off radiation exposure cards and fill the cards out prior to the activity. The cards need to be handed to each student at the beginning of the activity. For Part 2, students need to have access to electronic devices that enable them to watch a video. 

We thank the Austrian Red Cross for allowing us to use their Radiation Exposure Cards as inspiration for the cards that are used in this activity. 

Part 1: Nuclear weapons’ effects on human bodies

A nuclear armed state has exploded a nuclear weapon in your town/a city near you. You have all been impacted, but in different ways. The details of your exposure are indicated on the card you have been given upon entering class. 

In groups of 2-3 students, discuss the following questions: 

• How would you feel if you would experience the injuries indicated on your card?

• What would be the first thing you would do?

• Do you think it would be safe for you to go outside?  

• Who would you turn to for help?

• What would you do if there is no infrastructure available? 

• Where would you go if the hospitals in your region have been destroyed? 

• Are there people who are wounded around you who you would have to support? 

• Are communication channels operational?

Part 2: The representation of bodies in plans to respond to a nuclear emergency

Please watch the following video by Mary Olson, Founder and Acting Director of the Gender and Radiation Impact Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZjUuBgQN_0&feature=youtu.be 

Now discuss the following questions in groups of 3 or 4 students:

• How are bodies represented on the emergency response card that you received? 

• What is included in the representation?

• What is excluded? 

• What is problematic about the way the body is represented on your card? 

• If you could design your own card, what kind of body would you draw? 

In the light of Olson’s video, reconsider the online sources consulted for the first task:

• How are bodies represented in the NYC Nuclear Preparedness video? Are there any images of bodies?

• How do race, gender and class feature in the resources on emergency responses to nuclear emergencies? 

• The core reading by Terry Tempest Williams presents a story about bodies and families in the nuclear world. Do you find her story represented in materials on responses to nuclear emergencies?

Learning Objectives

• This activity puts a spotlight on the experiences and representations of bodies in the nuclear world. Representations of bodies are political. They reinforce body and gender norms. Feminism reveals the catastrophic effects of nuclear technologies on bodies and allows you to see how a person’s class, race and gender determine the likelihood of their exposure to nuclear harm. By completing the activity, you can experience how feminism puts bodies and the politics of the representation of bodies at the center of the nuclear world.