Engaging Nuclear Publics: Mediations Across Civil and Political Society

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Paper Session: Environmental Communication Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

I analyze the documentary coverage of a public hearing held in June 2007 that was debating the Environmental Impact Assessment Report related to atomic power plants in Koodankulam, Southern India and my own fieldwork of the People’s Convention on Nuclear Energy in Ahemdabad during July 2013. Through an engagement with postcolonial empirical contexts, I problematize the deliberative model related to public participation in environmental decision-making. Drawing on Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) work, I analyze the Indian nuclear establishment’s ways of differentially addressing some stakeholders in the environmental controversy as scientific-citizens belonging to the “civil society” and others as scientifically illiterate populations belonging to “political society.” Such a governmental approach, I argue, serves to perpetuate the experts-laypersons divide and thereby fails to emerge with expertise that could be a “public resource” by integrating scientific knowledge with local concerns (Kinsella, 2004).

Author

• Rahul Mukherjee, University of Pennsylvania