Revisiting the Nuclear Order. Technopolitical Landscapes and Timescapes
11-12 June 2018
Institut d’études avancées
17 quai d’Anjou, 75004, Paris
Organization: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Soraya Boudia (Université Paris Descartes), Kyoko Sato (Stanford University)
You will find attached the program of this international conference and below a presentation in French. The program is also available at this address: https://bit.ly/2HeqT1D
This second workshop is dedicated to exploring the spatial and temporal dimensions of nuclear order. It is a part of a bilateral France/United States research project funded by the Partner University Fund for a period of 3 years (2016-
2019). The first workshop, “Making the World Nuclear After Hiroshima”, took place
at Stanford on May 22-23, 2017 (http://hiroshimaconference.weebly.com). The final conference will be held in Japan in 2019, and the project will conclude with an
edited volume.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been widely perceived as the dawn of a new era, the
Nuclear Age that Gunther Anders described as “the age in which at any given moment we have the power to transform any given place on our planet, and even our planet itself, into a Hiroshima.” It was quickly realized that nuclear technology changed the scale of the problems to face with planetary challenges that required
a global mode of governance. As a marker of the power of states and national sovereignty, nuclear power played a key role in the Cold War and influenced international politics in the following decades. With nuclear technology the
world became a laboratory to address a variety of issues, ranging from energy independence to deterrence, from safety and security to the management of waste and disasters. Nuclear power has also profoundly shaped cultural productions (e.g., cinema, literature, art), as an icon of power and means of massive destruction. Since the Cold War period, in turn, nuclear energy has reconfigured our societies,
through persistent geopolitical tensions and symbolic representations associated with it, in particular through museums and memorials.