Shiloh Krupar
Associate Professor
Culture & Politics Program Core Faculty
Georgetown University
Co-sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies and the Albert Smith Nuclear Age Fund at CU Boulder
Abstract
Operating in the tradition of the atlases and counter-maps developed by critical and activist scholars, A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado is a collectively authored digital project documenting and interpreting the sites, issues, policies, and cultures associated with the American nuclear weapons complex as it enters its ninth decade. Co-edited by Sarah Kanouse and Shiloh Krupar with more than 40 contributors to date, the Atlas collects and cross-references many types of knowledge, affective registers, and forms of evidence: maps, photographs, and descriptions of major and minor nuclear sites; issue briefs offering historical and policy contexts; artworks responding to nuclear legacies; and scholarly essays connecting Colorado’s specific atomic histories to broader issues concerning environmental justice, technoscientific practice, the formation of a nuclear citizenry, and the performance and projection of hegemony. In this presentation, Shiloh Krupar discusses their approach to building both the social infrastructures that created and maintain the Atlas and the experimental interface design that resists at the level of form the compartmentalization and black-boxing of military and industrial nuclear discourses. Speaking to the Asian Networks of Nuclearity workshop agenda and to a wide range of disciplines, from Art History to Geography, the presentation will conclude with reflections on Atlas pedagogy and nuclear arts and policy. See Colorado Nuclear Atlas.
Poster Image credit: Shanna Merola, “An Invisible Yet Highly Energetic Form of Light”