(Nuclear) neglect neglected: The politics of knowledge production through neglect

• In Event: Conspiracy, Coterie, Contagion And Other Not-so-good Relations

Abstract

In The Occupied Clinic, Varma thinks about good care and “care’s opposites—refusal, neglect, disinterest, and harm” as practiced together when legitimate and shadowy figures care in techno-medico-scientific enactments (13). However, de la Bellacasa in hurriedly offering care practices for “remediating neglect” (162), agnotology scholars in marking off neglect as a psychological and moral issue, and not ‘as a substantive epistemic practice” as ignorance is (Alcoff 39) and environmental scholars writing in passing about state neglect of contaminated communities and scholars’ and experts’ own neglect of local knowledges about contamination (Ottinger 19), crucial analysis of “neglect” as an epistemic practice that validates, legitimates, enables, and forms epistemologies of matters of concern is itself neglected.

Radiation protection rules care for the protection of individuals and environment from irradiation. However, the rules frame the individuals as passive recipients of radioactive dosages rather than as active “agents” of knowing irradiation. Through neglect of their epistemic agency, more-than-human bodies, although “cared for,” and their sensed knowledge about contamination are delegitimized. Neglect shapes legitimate ways of knowing contamination through sensed digital readings of state-sanctioned Geiger counters and environmental surveillance studies. Such legitimate ways of knowing formed through neglect then comes to be “epistemologies of neglect.”

Using two contexts of nuclear waste practices—the 2010 Mayapuri radiological incident and the ongoing debate on decommissioning the Indian Point Energy Centre, NY (Ali) – and borrowing from feminist and postcolonial STS, this paper analyzes “nuclear safety,” a matter of “concern” in nuclear regulation, as an “epistemology of neglect.” In such a way, the paper addresses the techno-moral-epistemic figurations of care/neglect through a sensory, para-sited and multispecies ethnography.

Bibliography
Alcoff, Linda M. 2008. “Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, 39–58. Charlesbourg, Québec: Braille Jymico Inc.
Ali, Misria S. 2020. “Memorializing Decommissioning: A Nuclear Culture Approach to Safety Culture.” RSA Journal 31 (2020): 33-58.
de la Bellacasa, Maria Puig Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Ottinger, Gwen. 2013. Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges. New York, NY: New York University Press
Varma, Saiba. The Occupied Clinic Militarism and Care in Kashmir. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Author

• Misria Shaik Ali, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute