New Nuclear Imaginaries

New Nuclear Imaginaries

April 6-7, 2017

Harvard University

Draft Program

Thursday, April 6 – Harvard University Center for the Environment, Room 440

2:00 Opening Remarks

Nuclear worlds today are at a crossroads. As infrastructures age, stockpiles and wastes accumulate, and technologies, materials and interpretations proliferate, we face questions about how to build a just and responsible future out of the ambiguous legacies we have inherited. The future presents challenges of imagination as much as of technology and policy.

Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard Kennedy School)

Andy Stirling (University of Sussex, SPRU)

2:15 Session 1: Nuclear Pasts and Futures

What are the emerging metaphors, images, framings, and discourses of contemporary nuclear thinking. Which do we believe will be more and less helpful in building a future world we’d like to see?

Speakers:

Ulrike Felt (University of Vienna)

Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard Kennedy School)

Andrew Stirling (University of Sussex)

Matthew Bunn (Harvard Kennedy School)

Richard Lester (MIT)

4:00 Break

5:00 Public Lecture: Atomic Imaginations - Austin Hall 111, Harvard Law School

Keynote Speaker: Jonathon Porritt (Forum for the Future), “Nuclear Chimeras: Britain’s Slow Death as a Nuclear Power”

Porritt is a British environmentalist and writer, author most recently of The World We Made (Phaidon 2015). He has been a longstanding campaigner against nuclear power.

With Panelists:

Carol Cohn (University of Massachusetts, Boston)

Allison Macfarlane (George Washington University)

Jayita Sarkar (Boston University)

Daniel Schrag (Harvard University Center for the Environment)

Friday, April 7 – Harvard University Center for the Environment, Room 440

The morning sessions will bring out how previous articulations of nuclear threats and their management have made some things (technical aspects, power relations, infrastructures, etc.) visible and hidden or contained others. Speakers will discuss how decisions about visibility and invisibility—whether explicit or unconscious—may have unintended consequences.

9:00 Session 2: Concealments

Lynn Eden (Stanford University)

Scott Kemp (MIT)

Christopher Lawrence (Harvard, STS Program)

Rebecca Slayton (Cornell University)

Alex Wellerstein (Stevens Institute of Technology)

10:30 Coffee

11:00 Session 3: Memory and Forgetfulness

Michael Dennis (Naval War College)

Egle Rindzeviciute (Kingston University, London)

Kyoko Sato (Stanford University, STS)

Sonja Schmid (Virginia Tech)

12:30 Lunch

The afternoon sessions will allow speakers to discuss what they see as the major challenges regarding nuclear energy and nuclear weapons in the 21st century. Our hope is that some of the STS themes arising during the absence/visibility section will be carried over into this more concrete discussion of nuclear issues.

1:30 Session 4: Waste and Burial

Rod Ewing (Stanford University)

Peter Galison (Harvard University)

Allison Macfarlane (George Washington University)

Miranda Schreurs (TUM, Munich)

3:00 Coffee

3:30 Session 5: Security and Sustainability Discourses in the 21st Century

Matthew Bunn (Harvard Kennedy School)

Sam Weiss Evans (Harvard University)

Peter Haas (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Steven Miller (Harvard Kennedy School)