Article ID: CBB269303029

Signs of Risk: Materiality, History, and Meaning in Cold War Controversies over Nuclear Contamination (2020)

unapi

This study draws on ethnographic and archival evidence from the Italian Archipelago of La Maddalena, offshore from the northeastern corner of Sardinia, where in 1972 the U.S. Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines. It addresses two questions: (1) How do non-experts make sense of radiological risk absent knowledge and classified information about its instantiations and consequences? (2) How do objectifications of risk change and stabilize within the same community over time? STS scholarship has emphasized the epistemic and relational dimensions of lay/expert controversies over risk assessment. Many case studies, mostly focused on the Anglo-Saxon world, have assumed lay and expert ways of knowing are incompatible due to clashing cultural identities. I use Keane's concept of “semiotic ideologies” and Peircean semiotic theory to critically reassess the validity of that assumption and examine the role of material evidence in processes of signification to explain how experts and non-experts fix, challenge, and negotiate the meanings of radiological risk in sociotechnical controversies. I critically review empirical studies and analyze ethnographic and archival data to advance a set of methodological and substantive arguments: meanings of risk change as new signs become available for interpretation; and meanings of risk are semiotically regimented: their emergence or silencing depend upon the power relations in place in a given community and organizational efforts to assemble coherent technopolitical arguments. I call this set of organizational practices “politics of coherence.”

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB269303029/

Similar Citations

Article Kuchinskaya, Olga; (2011)
Articulating the Signs of Danger: Lay Experiences of Post-Chernobyl Radiation Risks and Effects (/isis/citation/CBB001034665/)

Article Usdin, Steven T.; (2009)
The Rosenberg Ring Revealed: Industrial-Scale Conventional and Nuclear Espionage (/isis/citation/CBB001030400/)

Book Schmid, Sonja D.; (2015)
Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (/isis/citation/CBB001510002/)

Book Hiroshi 浩 Ichikawa 市川; (2018)
Soviet Science and Engineering in the Shadow of the Cold War (/isis/citation/CBB440538305/)

Book David H. Price; (2016)
Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (/isis/citation/CBB603109839/)

Article Simone Turchetti; (2020)
The Unflinching Mr. Smith and the Nuclear Age (/isis/citation/CBB663303797/)

Book Hecht, Gabrielle; (2012)
Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (/isis/citation/CBB001210364/)

Book Hecht, Gabrielle; (2011)
Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (/isis/citation/CBB001251047/)

Article Joseph D. Martin; Gisela Mateos; David P. D. Munns; Edna Suárez-Díaz; (2021)
Special Issue Introduction: Historical Peculiarity and the Order of the Phoenix (/isis/citation/CBB512290540/)

Book Edward Kaplan; (2022)
The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (/isis/citation/CBB085828755/)

Book Eckart Conze; Martin Klimke; Jeremy Varon; (2016)
Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s (/isis/citation/CBB924250158/)

Book Masco, Joseph; (2006)
The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (/isis/citation/CBB000741824/)

Authors & Contributors
Hecht, Gabrielle
Eckart Conze
Natalino Virdis
Edward Kaplan
Antonello Zanda
Jayson A. Altieri
Concepts
Cold War
Nuclear industry
Science and war; science and the military
Science and society
Radioactivity
Nuclear weapons; atomic weapons
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
20th century
Places
United States
Soviet Union
France
Saudi Arabia
Sardinia
Islands of the Pacific
Institutions
United States Navy
United States National Security Council
University of Cagliari
Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale della Sardegna
KGB
United States. Department of Defense
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment