NUCLEAR SOCIETIES
NUCLEAR SOCIETIES
The Nuclear Societies is going to the Royal Geographical Society and Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference 2026! See our call for abstracts below:
Session Title: Grounding nuclear imaginaries: placing geographies of nuclear ‘progress’, protest, and care
Convenors: Sebastian Koa (University of Exeter), Caitlin Mullin (University of Exeter), Willow Ross (University of Bristol)
Session Abstract
The nuclear continues to preoccupy our imaginations. Across the world, we appear to be in the throes of yet another supposed nuclear renaissance. This week, the Doomsday clock shifted closer to midnight. The nuclear continues to animate popular culture, with Oppenheimer, Fallout, Atomfall, and Chernobyl (re)imagining both real and speculative histories of nuclear in the twentieth century. The legacies of nuclear waste continue to linger, taking on an increased importance in the new millennium and entangling contested deep-time imaginaries. With an increasingly tense global balance of power, including the reinvigoration of state nuclear testing programmes, our world is increasingly at risk of further nuclear harm. But this harm is not – and has never been – evenly felt across people or place.
This resurgence has occasioned a re-emergence of the nuclear as an object of scholarly interest (Alexis-Martin and Davies, 2017). In its multiple forms as energy, weapon, medicine, and waste, the nuclear manifests as an affectively charged constellation of aspirations (Joly and Le Renard, 2021) and anxieties (Dunlop, 2014). There have been increasing calls within nuclear geographies that demand we pay closer attention to the supply chains of the nuclear fuel cycle, to nuclear history and its entanglements with colonialism, environmental racism, and extractivism (Urwin, 2025; Hecht, 2012; Voyles, 2015). Implicit in this call is the claim that the injustices characteristic of a nuclear world (such as nuclear colonialism) are not simply expressions of material conditions, but entangled in and underpinned by a set of social imaginaries. These imaginaries – their modes of production, their internal logics and inconsistencies, the possibilities they enable or foreclose, and the forms of power that they underpin – form the focus of this session.
Two questions are of particular interest. The first is the extent to which contemporary nuclear imaginaries are tied to or inherit from ideas, knowledges, and aesthetics of the past. Are these novel formations, or do they bear the traces and traumas (Schwab, 2020) of bygone periods like the Cold War (Faux, 2024)? To what extent are efforts to renew the nuclear, for example the efforts to brand civil nuclear power as ‘green’, an effective strategy in re-ontologising it? At the heart of this is a consideration of the nature of nuclear imaginaries as a potent mode of reproducing historical patterns (and violences) as well as a new set of tools to grasp the idiosyncrasies of the present. The second centres the relationship between nuclear imaginaries and place. In the last two decades, important ethnographic and historical research have sought to articulate various ‘local’ nuclear imaginaries tied to particular nation-states, governments, and scientific organisations, for example, an American post-Cold War nuclear imaginary (Masco, 2008), British nuclear cultures (Hogg, 2016; Hogg and Brown, 2019; Hughes, 2012), and civic epistemologies of the Indian elite classes (Anderson, 2010; Haines, 2019). Yet, outside of this corpus, scholars note a tendency in popular imaginaries of the nuclear to untether from place. The historian Lisa Yoneyama (1999, 2023) calls this tendency nuclear universalism, where the abstraction of nuclear imaginaries – especially into global imaginaries by way of an aesthetics of apocalypse – obscures the structural violence inflicted upon communities existing outside of these imaginaries (Nixon, 2010, 2011). The disembedding of imaginaries from place performs an obscuring function; it is only by concealing the long-term material and ecological burdens of the nuclear that its inherent promises (e.g. of cheap and endless energy in service of accumulation) can be upheld (Pottin, 2024). These are nuclear imaginaries that ironically inhibit imagination itself, making it hard to think otherwise (Deckard, 2022).
Taken together, these two questions guide what promises to be a lively exchange on the forms and functions of nuclear imaginaries in yet another supposed ‘nuclear renaissance’. The session turns on the central provocation that it ought to matter where thought takes place and how thought makes place. Only by attending to the worlding capacities of imaginaries might we be able to consider ways to shift them (Carpenter, 2016). We invite papers that consider the recursive relationships between nuclear imaginaries and nuclear places. Themes that might be taken up include, but are not limited to:
If interested, please submit your abstract by 13 Feb 2026 via email to sk902@exeter.ac.uk (Sebastian Koa), cam272@exeter.ac.uk (Caitlin Mullin), and willow.ross@bristol.ac.uk (Willow Ross).
References
Alexis-Martin, B. & Davies, T. (2017) Towards nuclear geography: Zones, bodies, and communities. Geography Compass, 11 (9).
Anderson, R. S. (2010) Nucleus and Nation Scientists, International Networks, and Power in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barad, K. (2017) Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable. New Formations, 92, 56-86.
Bensaude-Vincent, B., Boudia, S. & Sato, K. (2022) Introduction: shaping the nuclear order. In: Bensaude-Vincent, B., Boudia, S. & Sato, K. (eds.) Living in a Nuclear World: From Fukushima to Hiroshima. London: Routledge, 1-19.
Carpenter, E. (2016) Shifting the Nuclear Imaginary: Art and the Flight from Nuclear Modernity. In: Beck, J. & Bishop, R. (eds.) Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics. 116-133.
Davies, T. (2015) Nuclear Borders: Informally Negotiating the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. In: Morris, J. & Polese, A. (eds.) Informal Economies in Post-Socialist Spaces: Practices, Institutions and Networks. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 225-244.
Deckard, S. (2022) “The Future Is Behind Them!”: Post-Apocalypse and the Enduring Nuclear in Post-Soviet Russian Fiction. In: Monnet, L. (ed.) Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 39-58.
Dunlop, G. (2014) Thresholds: Gateways to the nuclear imagination. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 1 (2), 247-264.
Eschle, C. (2016) Bairns Not Bombs: The Scottish Peace Movement and the British Nuclear State. in The United Kingdom and the Future of Nuclear Weapons, Futter, A. (ed). Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Faison, E. and Fields, A. (eds.) (2024) Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific. Washington: University of Washington Press.
Faux, E. (2024) Navigating nuclear narratives in contemporary television: The BBC’s Vigil. Review of International Studies, 1-17.
Foley, T .J. (2021) Waiting for waste: Nuclear imagination and the politics of distant futures in Finland. Energy Research & Social Science, 72.
Haines, M. B. (2019) Contested credibility economies of nuclear power in India. Social Studies of Science, 49 (1), 29-51.
Hecht, G. (2012) Being Nuclear – Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Hogg, J. (2016) British Nuclear Culture: Official and Unofficial Narratives in the Long 20th Century. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Hogg, J. & Brown, K. (2019) Introduction: social and cultural histories of British nuclear mobilisation since 1945. Contemporary British History, 33 (2), 161-169.
Hughes, J. (2012) What is British nuclear culture? Understanding Uranium 235. The British Journal for the History of Science, 45 (4), 495-518.
Jasanoff, S. & Kim, S.-H. (eds.) (2015) Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Joly, P.-B. & Le Renard, C. (2021) The past futures of techno-scientific promises. Science & Public Policy, 48 (6), 900-910.
Keating, T. P. & Storm, A. (2023) Nuclear memory: Archival, aesthetic, speculative. Progress in Environmental Geography, 2 (1-2), 97-117.
Livingstone, D. N. (2003) Putting science in its place: Geographies of scientific knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Masco, J. (2008) “Survival is Your Business”: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America. Cultural Anthropology, 23 (2), 361-398.
Masco, J. (2021). The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Nixon, R. (2010) Unimagined Communities: Developmental Refugees, Megadams and Monumental Modernity. New Formations, 69 (69), 62-80.
Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Pottin, A. (2024) Le nucléaire imaginé: Le rêve du capitalisme sans la Terre. Paris: La Découverte.
Ross, L. M. (2021) “Dounreay: Creating the Nuclear North.” The Scottish Historical Review, 100 (1), 82–108.
Schwab, G. (2020) Radioactive Ghosts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Urwin, J. (2025) Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia. Washington: University of Washington Press.
Voyles, T. B. (2015) Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Yoneyama, L. (1999) Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Yoneyama, L. (2023) Co-Conjuration: Practicing Decolonial Nuclear Criticisms. Apocalyptica, 1, 59-84.