The state comes home: Radiation and in-situ dispossession in Canada

In 1975 it was discovered that the small Ontario community of Port Hope was widely contaminated with radioactive waste from the local uranium refinery, including hundreds of homes. Through close analysis of state archives, regulatory documents, media, and key informant interviews, I analyze how the radioactive contamination of the home constitutes an in-situ dispossession, a material, corporeal and psychosocial dislocation in everyday life. In so doing, I reveal discrepancies between internal state positions and those publically conveyed, while showing how the categories of normal and abnormal are malleable social constructs and geopolitical tools of state power. By investigating the contamination of Port Hope through the lens of everyday life, I aim to add to critical geographies of home while contributing to scholarship demonstrating the multi-scalar interconnectedness of body, home, and nation-state.     

用电子束辐照加固秦俑彩绘

为有效加固秦俑彩绘,选择单体渗透、电子束辐照加固方法进行保护。在最佳辐照加固条件：以2-羟基甲基丙烯酸乙酯为单体,用1MeV2．0mA 60kGy电子束辐照可有效地加固秦俑彩绘层。加固后的陶俑表面没有出现光泽,彩绘层颜色鲜艳如初,生漆层、颜料层也再无起翘、脱落现象,干燥、自然。     

Nuclear necropower: The engineering of death conditions around a nuclear power plant in south India

The article concentrates on the ways people's claim to life, citizenry and democratic dissent were revoked the more they dared to defy and mobilise against a nuclear power plant at Kudankulam in southern India. Building on the literature on biopower and necropower, it is argued that the Indian state is exercising nuclear necropower through the creation of death conditions for subaltern populations as well as their political supporters. These ‘death worlds’ go beyond physical demise to encompass ecological, social and political conditions by which a person's life is diminished. Victims, suspects, and/or targets are geographically, socially and politically created as a consequence of sliding and syncretic subjugations to do with ‘let die’ and ‘make die’. These variegated perspectives might be delineated by way of three overlapping modalities that embed necropower in the politics of the nuclear industries, environment, social hierarchies and state-backed operations to undermine subaltern populations, anti-nuclear activists and environmentalists. The first modality encompasses ecological factors by way of a silent and encroaching death where nuclear industries subject marginalised communities and casual labourers to a life of environmental uncertainty, exploitation and health hazards. The second is the more overt and punitive violence exacted on- and offline in order to contain and extinguish dissent against nuclear power. The third is by way of producing a culture of vilification in terms of strategies designed to malign and outcaste anti-nuclear activists and environmentalists.     

Invisible radiation reveals who we are as people: environmental complexity,gendered risk,and biopolitics after the Fukushima nuclear disaster

The March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, and the subsequent tsunami and release of nuclear contamination from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, is clearly one of the largest disasters of the past century and it has devastated large portions of eastern Japan. In this paper we explore the coping mechanisms of people navigating these landscapes of contamination, as well as examine state policies developed to deal with the disaster. We argue that there has been a significant discrepancy between state policies and the needs of people directly affected by the catastrophe. To more fully examine why this discrepancy exists – and how it is produced – we investigate the complex geographies of contamination and risk near the damaged Fukushima power plant through the conceptual lens of ‘wet ontologies’ coupled with an analysis of state strategies for the governance of the affected populations. In our research we found that Foucauldian theorizations on biopower, neoliberalism and environmental governance can help explain how nuclear power as a social institution can require states to sacrifice the well-being of hundreds of thousands of their citizens in ways that affect people in gendered and age-specific ways.