Chaired by Helge Jordheim
Inna Sukhenko: Synchronizing Spatiotemporal Modalities in Fictionalizing Nuclear Energy: Literary Imaginaries of Solastalgia in U.S. Nuclear Fiction
The variety of emotions in narrating the nuclear history of humanity overwhelms the range of concepts such as eco-grief, tierratrauma, anxiety, radiophobia etc within debating the Nuclear Anthropocene’s agenda (Schuppli 2016) and distinguishing the transformations of the value paradigm of the nuclear energy dependent society via its behaviours, priorities and values (Szeman 2018). Contextualizing the range of emotions in fictionalizing nuclear history (a nuclear disaster, in our case) appeals to the amalgamation of factual and fictional narratives, where framing the spaciotemporal setting of nuclear events helps switch from over-emoting a nuclear trauma to nuclear knowledge (via curiosity, investigation, hope) that helps to reconsider ‘nuclear’ traumatic experience from the perspective of transiting scientific facts to the public in the context of deemoting toxic georgaphies (Mahtani 2014) but emoting the scientific knowledge (nuclear literacy, energy literacy, health literacy etc). Such perspective on fictionalizing the nuclear disaster and ‘nuke’ trauma experienced community helps frame ‘spatiotemporal modality’ (Elleström 2020: 48), where the spatiotemporal parameters of the events not only define its historical, cultural, and social circumstances of its representation/reception a disaster but synchronize the transformations of emotions and the transition of scientific knowledge (nuclear knowledge management) via emotionalizing and personalizing (‘scientific knowledge [has] to be personalized and emotionalized‘ (Bruhn, 2020)) the nuclear related traumatic experience within the social and historical contexts in fictional writing practices. On the example of studying the literary figurations of ‘solastalgia’ – ‘a distress of environmental changes’ (Albrecht 2006) in the context of narrating the nuclear (post)- apocalyptic settings under the ecocritical perspectives (intermedial ecocriticism, Bruhn 2020 ) reveals the synchronization of spatiotemporal modalities in narrating the nuclear disaster with its premises and aftermath. It is the reference to solastalgia, which contributes to synchronizing the range of emotions towards the nuclear energy and the transformations of environmental settings of a physical/spiritual survival and situating the transmission of scientific knowledge in order to communicate ‘spatiotemporal modalities’ of ‘nuclear trauma’-related narratives. The literary implications of ‘solastalgia’ as a synchronizer of spaciotemporal modalities within nuclear postapocalyptic narratives are studied here in U.S. Chernobyl fictional writings, such as Andrea White’s Radiant Girl (2008), Anna Blankman’s The Blackbird Girls (2020) and Rachel Barenbaum’s Atomic Anna (2022), which contributes to avoiding over-emotionalizing ‘nuclear energy’ and switching to critical thinking on nuclear energy related issues within further facilitating discussion on the temporalities of energy culture.
Bio: Inna Sukhenko, PhD, is a visiting research fellow of Helsinki Environmental Humanities Hub, the Department of Cultures, the University of Helsinki. Her current project is focused on researching the literary dimensions of nuclear energy within energy literary narrative studies and energy humanities. She teaches courses on nuclear narrative studies and Chernobyl studies. After defending her PhD in Literary Studies (Dnipro, Ukraine), she has been a research fellow of Erasmus Mundus (Bologna, 2008; Turku, 2011-2012), Cambridge Colleges Hospitality Scheme (2013), SUSI (Ohio, 2016), Open Society Foundation/Artes Liberales Foundation (Warsaw, 2016-2017), JYU Visiting Fellowship Programme (Jyväskylä, 2021), PIASt Fellowship Programme (2021), PIASt Fellowship Prorgamme (Warsaw, 2022). She is among the contributors of The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (2019). Her general research interests lie within environmental humanities, energy humanities, petrocultures, ecocriticism, nuclear criticism, literary energy narrative studies, nuclear fiction, energy ethics. She is a member of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (Finland), HELSUS (Finland), the Finnish Society for Development Research (Finland), and Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS).
Nabanita Samanta: Re/con/figuring ‘Disaster’ as Temporal (Dis)order: Crisis, Chronopolitics, and Agential Assemblages
‘Disaster’ as a multi-vocal term continues to be frequently-invoked as much in popular lexicons as in policy discourses; and such discourses are surely going to endure with further momentum amidst the multiple and mutually reinforcing risks and vulnerabilities transpiring into disasters. While ‘disaster’ as an analytical conceit might help us in understanding and unpacking the complexities of the contemporary world, attending to the temporalities entrenched to the framing of disaster can prove to be fruitful for rearticulating the conceptual repertoire of critical disaster studies – this paper while attending to the temporal politics of disaster attempts at treading some preliminary moves towards this direction. The paper problematizes different conceptual framings of ‘disaster’ – including the often-invoked event-versus-process, realist-versus-constructivist, slow-onset versus rapid-onset distinctions etc, – and tries to reinscribe the temporal coordinates of disaster to render intelligible the complexities underlying its causal intricacies as well as its afterlives. Drawing on ethnographic vignettes from an ongoing research on coastal transformation, the paper underscores how the framing of disaster – and often the political appropriation of the same – encapsulates disruptive temporal spaces insofar as interventions such as ‘disaster risk reduction’ and ‘resilience building’ intrude into the present and (re)shape the future. This might operate in two ways – recasting the past as vulnerable and/or anticipating the future as risky – thereby controlling the making and unmaking of temporality at a ‘disasterscape’. Centering time as a matter-of-concern as well as a matter-of-care, the paper argues how temporal dynamics remain very much primal in the process of recovery, resilience and rebuilding particularly against the backdrop of the emergent and ongoing poly-crises in the wake of the Anthropocene. Furthermore, the paper presents conceptual moves towards arriving at a nuanced iteration of disaster wherein the temporal scaffold of disaster is not plotted along a linear register of time with demarcated beginnings and ends; instead an attempt is being made to trace plural and polymorphous renderings of time as embedded in the specific social, political, economic, material, scientific, and discursive practices and imaginations that give way to certain forms of disasters-in-the-making. A term like ‘disaster’, far from a neutral descriptor, remains deeply and inextricably infused with ideological and political intentions; hence discursive potency of disaster is highlighted by way of attending to the processes of politicizing time. Furthermore, bringing attention to the bearings of time and its multitudes on the question of agency, the paper engages with the exercise of reassembling agency as it attends to how the agential realm of a disaster is being animated by a wide array of situated practices that are mediated socially, politically, and ecologically.
Bio: Nabanita is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (Mumbai, India). As a passionate student of social sciences, Nabanita posits her research-interests at the intra-section of ‘ecology’, ‘society’ and the ‘self’. Some of her current academic engagements span across the transdisciplinary fields of political ecology, ecological anthropology, critical agrarian studies, blue humanities, marine and coastal governance etc. Nabanita’s PhD project dwells on the processes of making and unmaking of ports in view of the proliferating ‘blue growth’; and the project seeks to forge conversations across political ecology, anthropology of infrastructure, STS and Anthropocene studies.
Joo Yunjeong: Living with Slow Disaster: Concept and Practice
This presentation aims to provide a sociological exploration of slow disasters and will discuss the key elements of slow disasters as well as relevant methodological approaches. Borrowing from Nick Robson's concept of 'slow violence', slow disaster refers to the disaster that does not occur as a single, spectacular event, but develops slowly and is catastrophic by the time it is finally noticed. 'Slow disaster' is a way of thinking about disasters not as discrete events, but as long-term processes linked across time." (Knowles, 2020) Disasters are often presented as a single event, when in fact there is a significant accumulation of pressures that manifest as an event, or a significant post-event process and aftermath. Therefore, when trauma is studied alongside disaster research, it can be seen as the lasting repercussions of a single catastrophic event on individuals and societies.
In addition, slow-onset disasters are currently being discussed in the context of the climate crisis. These are events that occur gradually over a period of time, such as drought, desertification, rising sea levels and the spread of infectious diseases, overall environmental degradation. For this reason, we sometimes discuss fast and slow disasters separately. However, the concept of slow disasters can be seen as an attempt to go beyond the dualism of clock time and lived time, to construct a plurality of time, and to understand the layering of temporality as a process.
For this, I will explore the meaning of 'slow' in slow disasters. Slow does not simply mean slow clock time, it can also mean invisibility, not a fixed point in time or a single event, refering to the layered nature of experienced time and the complexity of multiple temporalities. To fully grasp slow disaster, it is essential to combine the historical and sociological imagination, and I would like to consider how the process of temporality can be analysed as a lived experience, including long-term duration, the deep history in the Anthropocene, and sociological longitudinal qualitative research and life course analysis.
To this end, I will present the case of a slow disaster in a nuclear power plant village and explore the application of the concept. Busan is the second largest city in South Korea, home to 10 nuclear reactors and a population of 3 million people within a 30km radius. People in the surrounding villages have been exposed to the risks of environmental contamination, strange diseases, mutations, sea level changes, increased earthquakes and typhoons since 1979, when the plant began operations. The time of the half-life of radioactivity, the time of geological zones and fault lines, the time of climate crisis, the time of the local history of the village of Gori, the time of colonisation and modernisation, the time of the dispersal of the villagers, the time of the sea and currents, the time of marine life and the time of development have all been intertwined to form the time of slow disaster.
Bio: Yunjeong JOO is an Assistant Professor(Sociology, Pusan National University, South Korea) -> Tenure Track Assistant Professor Sociology of human rights, multi-species justice, disability, disaster studies Principal Investigator for PNU SSK Living with Slow Disaster Project(10 year project(2023-2033), funded by Korean National Research Foundation) : livingwithslowdisaster.net.
Jill Stauffer: Beginning an Ending: Law, Territory, and the Possible End Times of Settler Colonialism
A structure of temporal lapse runs through the legal argumentation, reconciliatory language, and everyday life of settler colonial subjects: how settlers are trained to see and the stories they tell about the passing of time distort or render invisible enduring indigenous presence. This failure of perception makes it difficult for settlers to see their implication in ongoing harm. Relying on phenomenology—philosophical description of how we live in time and space—as well as examples from disputes between settlers and indigenous groups over land, water, and history in North America (Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, Standing Rock, etc.), this talk traces how settlement gets lived as an unquestioned reality by settlers, and how different accounts of temporality and of storytelling might open that reality to questioning and to the possibility of radical transformation. Is it possible for us to imagine the end times of settler colonialism? To unsettle what seems to be settled? World-building is always a joint enterprise (world-ending is too, but less definitely so). As such, I’ll end the talk by considering how we might begin an ending—working together jointly to end one world for the sake of creating another.
Bio: Jill Stauffer is associate professor and director of the concentration in Peace, Justice and Human Rights at Haverford College. Her book Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard, was published by Columbia University Press in 2015. She is on the editorial board of Voice of Witness, a non-profit oral history book series illuminating human rights crises by amplifying the voices of those who suffer through them. Her edited volume (with Bettina Bergo), Nietzsche and Levinas: After the Death of a Certain God, was published by Columbia University Press in 2009. She is currently working on a book on the relationship between time and law called Temporal Privilege.