Dear All,

The CRASSH research network Military Surplus is back for another term, exploring the traces, remnants and residues of militarisation past and present. Our program for the Lent term turns towards the imposition of the military within 'natural' environments – via leaks, clouds, concrete, steel, fences, pipelines, and policy documents. A selection of scholars will examine the manner in which military forces and industries reconfigure life on the level of ecosystems, altering relations between species and material worlds. The military's role in environmental management and remediation will also be discussed, alongside the increasing greenwashing of the military-industrial complex. 

Our first session for Lent, titled Atomic Legacies: the spatio-temporal dimensions of radioactive contamination, will take place this Thursday (25th of January, 5-7PM GMT) and features Prof. Catherine Alexander (Durham University) in conversation with Dr. Jonathon Turnbull (University of Oxford). Prof. Alexander will discuss her work on the history and aftermath of Soviet nuclear weapon testing in Kazakhstan, whilst Dr. Turnbull will focus on the concept of 'nuclear natures' as it pertains to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Please find abstracts below:

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Catherine Alexander
‘A chronotope of expansion: resisting spatio-temporal limits in a Kazakh nuclear town’

This paper explores the various strategies used by the Soviet regime to contain and ‘disappear’ the nuclear weapon test site in Kazakhstan before moving on to outline attempts by the independent Republic of Kazakshtan’s National Nuclear Centre (NNC) to be more open—including making much of the site available for commercial and agricultural use, after 25 years of remediation and monitoring. Juxtaposing these strategies with accounts from residents living in the town that hosts the NNC provides more ambivalent engagements with both town and site. Thus, in what I call a chronotope of expansion, what appears is a resistance to any kind of spatial or temporal containment, a denial of progress and the possibility of moving to a brighter nuclear future by leaving behind the Soviet period and its entailments. I end by discussing the consequences of assumptions that the site can be limited and bounded in terms of radioactive contamination.

Jonathon Turnbull
‘A natural laboratory? nuclear natures in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone’

Ukraine has recently been described as a “laboratory” in relation to global challenges involving the environment, information, warfare, and security. Ukraine is also the site of the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe of 1986: the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. The Zone straddles the border between Ukraine and Belarus and is frequently described as a natural laboratory; a place where researchers from various disciplines go to test diverse hypotheses. At the time of the catastrophe, it was predicted that Chornobyl would become a “dead zone,” incapable of supporting life. In the 37 years since, however, stories of nature’s resurgence in the Zone have proliferated, with images and imaginaries of both mutant life and “nature taking back control” becoming common refrains in public and scientific discourse. Indeed, Chornobyl is now an official biosphere reserve in Ukraine, yet researchers starkly contest whether nature in the Zone has recovered or not. This presentation is interested in how such diverse representations come to co-exist in relation to Chornobyl’s “nuclear natures.” It draws from fieldwork conducted in the Zone between 2019 and 2022 with researchers from the nebulous field of radioecology; a scientific community tasked with making sense of how radiation moves through and affects the natural world. It advances the notion that nuclear natures are spectacular and weird, situating itself within the emerging field of the Ukrainian environmental humanities.

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Register at https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/41073/ if you intend to attend the talk online or simply drop by the Alison Richard Building (University of Cambridge) this coming Thursday. 

Warm regards,

Zsuzsanna (on behalf of the Military Surplus Research Network)

Zsuzsanna Dominika Ihar (she/her)
PhD Candidate & Gates Scholar
History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge
@zsuzsannaihar

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