ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Nuclear History as Global History: Current Debates and New Perspectives 3

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Recent scholarship on nuclear science and technology has seen a profusion of global-scale histories. Their global aspect emerges from the selection as a primary object of study elements of a global character--international organizations and alliances, specific technologies, pollutants, pacifist or environmental activism, etc.-–and also from the contexts that fueled the early development of nuclear technology, including the global Cold War and the decline of European empires. These histories, while often sharing a focus on given actors, institutions or technical objects, diverge nonetheless in perspective and approach, being inspired by postcolonial studies, environmental history or science diplomacy and international relations debates.
This symposium critically considers these historiographical trends and the best methods for their synthesis and extension. How do these global perspectives inform each other and how can they contribute to a renewed historical look at nuclear history? What historiographical and methodological questions do they raise and share? How do they contribute to the current debates on global history and on globalization? How have histories of the worldwide nuclear complex been deployed to assert or contest hierarchies of power and states of visibility?
In this symposium, scholars who are forging distinct perspectives on global nuclear history present their current research and discuss the specific historiographical aspects of making a global nuclear history: the production of new historical sources, the identification of relevant actors and modes of historical agency, and the choice of new objects of study, to better understand the global character of nuclear things.
The symposium will be structured around three panels, devoted to global nuclear technopolitical systems, to global antinuclear activism and to the representations of the nuclear as a global entity, as well as a final roundtable.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• John Krige, Georgia Institute of Technology

Individual Presentations

• Global fallout and the local - Soraya de Chadarevian, University of California, Los Angeles

• Photographing the Atomic World: Visual Nuclear Histories Beyond the Global North - Maria Rentetzi

• Nuclear science as globalizing agent: from radiocarbon to the Nuclear Anthropocene - Nestor Herran, Sorbonne University

• Exploring the normalization of civilization-ending infrastructures in nuclear history via three new objects of study - Benoit Pelopidas