What does it mean to reckon with a contaminated world? Dr. Shannon Cram considers the social politics of this question and the regulatory infrastructures designed to answer it. In particular, she investigates remediation efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a former weapons complex in Washington State. Home to the majority of the nation's high-level nuclear waste and its largest environmental cleanup, Hanford is tasked with managing toxic materials that will long outlast the United States and its regulatory capacities. This talk considers the structural impossibilities associated with Hanford’s cleanup as well as the normative categories that inform environmental hazard. It recognizes that multi-millennial waste will inevitably exceed its institutional containers, and that administering eternity has unthinkable, science-fiction-like qualities. But it also explores the powerful conditions and contexts that define unthinkability itself—the social relations that designate some impacts as reasonable and others as inconceivable, allowing cleanup to distribute survival unevenly. Thus, it considers both the concrete and constructed realities of contaminated life, and the oft-blurred boundaries between the two.

Dr. Shannon Cram is an associate professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, where she co-directs the Science, Technology, and Society program. Her first book, Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility, won the Ludwik Fleck Prize, the Julian Steward Award, and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She lives in the Snoqualmie Valley.