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Anna Weichselbraun is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist teaching in the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna.She is currently finishing her book manuscript on knowledge making practices of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and has published articles from this research in Cultural Anthropology and PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
What is your area of expertise?
What was your career path to get here?
I earned a PhD in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2016), and completed a postdoc at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. I previously studied at New York University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Why should the public care?
Nuclear weapons are destabilizing and can have disastrous consequences. Beyond this, nuclear technologies have become a way states think about large scale infrastructure and investment. Technologies plays a significant role in the world we live in, therefore, dangers and risks of nuclear technology must be understood.
What is a current issue or trend that concerns you?
too many
Educational Resources
Description
This is a syllabus for a course that explores the connection between the development of nuclear technologies and the Anthropocene.Learning Objectives
- Understand the relationship between knowledge practices and political agency
- Explore how the nuclear age and the Anthropocene relate to each other
- Discover what forms of nuclear governance may work or not work for governance issues in the Anthropocene
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Co-authored Resources
Description
This activity prompts students to Locate, Identify, Examine, and Experience different nuclear-related sites (the examples in this exercise are Rocky Flats and Chernobyl) taking into account more-than-human perspectives.Learning Objectives
- research historical nuclear sites
- engage more-than-human analytic perspectives
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Description
In this activity, students are prompted to map a nuclear "object" in various dimensions, and to attempt to represent this object and its circulations with a map as well as through an explanatory essay.Learning Objectives
- identify how nuclear objects circulate in time and space
- critically engage with maps
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Description
This module invites students to engage critically with maps, understood as political instruments of knowledge. Two exercises encourage students to consider maps and their representational limits and possibilities.Learning Objectives
- critically engage with maps
- understand maps as political instruments of knowledge
Related Material
Description
This essay introduces how nuclear technologies and materials circulate as well as efforts and failures to control this circulation. It also provides a list of sources and resources for further reading and research.
Learning Objectives
- critically engage with maps
- identify radioactive spaces and places
- evaluate the environmental impacts of radiotoxicity on the more-than-human world
- introduce a decolonial way of seeing