Shannon Cram presents “Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility”

On October 13th, IAS faculty member Shannon Cram presented "Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility" at the Simpson Center for the Humanities. This talk explored the entangled challenges of waste, illness, and remediation at Washington State's Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Home to the majority of the nation’s high-level nuclear waste and its largest environmental cleanup, Hanford has been tasked with managing toxic materials that will long outlast the United States and its regulatory policies. Cram's presentation used a critical ethnographic approach to examine the embodied uncertainties and structural impossibilities integral to that effort. More broadly, she considered what it means to reckon with an increasingly contaminated world and how particular ways of knowing and regulating toxicity condition our very definitions of health, safety, and security.

The event was co-hosted by the Simpson Center and the Population Health Initiative as part of UW's tri-campus Let's Talk Pop Health series.