Alice Mah, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick The sense of cautious optimism following the Paris climate change agreements last December already seems worlds apart. Featured image: photo credit: Petter Rudwall, unsplash.com This issue marks the one-year anniversary of Toxic News. It has been a significant year for toxic issues around the world. The sense … Continue reading Editorial: Toxic Subjectivities
Peter C. Little, Department of Anthropology, Rhode Island College Agbogbloshie is ablaze. Featured image: Getting ready to burn a bundle of wires. Photo Credit: Peter Little For scholars and activists engaged in global environmental politics of high-tech rubbish, Agbogbloshie is a familiar name. A scrap site in Accra, Ghana, Agbogbloshie has attracted numerous international environmental … Continue reading On Electronic Pyropolitics and Pure Earth Friction in Agbogbloshie
Simona Grano, Department of Sinology, University of Zürich. In my professional capacity as academic, I work on industrial pollution issues in China and Taiwan (Grano, 2016/2015). I am so absorbed by the need to keep up with what happens in these two places, that I rarely pause to think about what has gotten me interested … Continue reading Toxic Canals
Dr Thom Davies, Research Fellow, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick @ThomDavies Around five years ago, I was in a village near Chernobyl. Bad Ukrainian electropop was hissing out of the car radio as we drove north towards the Exclusion Zone fence. I was frantically writing PhD research notes while we bumped along an uneven … Continue reading Editorial: Post-Atomic thoughts: Remembering Chernobyl and Fukushima
Professor Gabrielle Hecht is based at the Department of History at the University of Michigan, where she has also directed the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She has authored several award winning books about ‘nuclear things’. My obsession with nuclear things began as a teenager. In 1978, my family moved to Zurich, where for … Continue reading Field Notes from a Nuclear Nerd
Dr Olga Kuchinskaya, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh The main question about the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, as historian David Marples puts it, is “how many people did it actually affect through death, illness, or evacuation?” My book, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl, suggests that … Continue reading On the Consequences of Chernobyl
Dr Liz Maly, Assistant Professor in the International Research institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS), Tohoku University On March 11, 2011, the 9.0 magnitude Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) unleashed a massive tsunami devastating over 500 square kilometers of Japan’s northeast Tohoku coast. This region has experienced tsunamis every 30-40 years, but the size and impact … Continue reading Fukushima and the Right NOT to Return: Nuclear Displacement in a System for “Hometown Recovery”
Yohei Koyama, doctoral researcher in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Japan and Korea, SOAS, University of London, UK. “I’m afraid to say it, but we love Chernobyl. It’s become the meaning of our lives. The meaning of our suffering” (Alexievich 1997, 215), says Natalya Roslova. She is one of the voices in Svetlana Alexievich’s … Continue reading The ‘uncanny’ in Fukushima’s nuclear aftermath: anxiety-provoking attachment to home
Dr Nick Rush-Cooper, Teaching Fellow in the Department of Geography, University of Durham, UK. We are in pitch darkness. Maxim, the lead tour guide, leads the group of visitors from the front and takes us down a short corridor within the ruins of ‘Energetik’; the cultural centre of Pripyat, the town built to house the … Continue reading Chernobyl and Stalker: ‘Splinters of the Soviet Empire’
Nathaniel Ray Pickett, PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Kansas, USA When the city of Slavutych was built, it was for a very specific purpose: to house the workers of those who would continue to work at the post-disaster Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant and their families. It was the … Continue reading Notes from Slavutych: the last nuclear monotown
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