Learning outcomes: Upon successful completion, students will be able to:

• Understand and critically interpret the historical, political, and sociocultural conditions that shaped the Atomic Age.
• Analyse the life cycle of nuclear technologies (extraction, production, use, waste) and their impact on human and non-human life forms through interdisciplinary approaches.
• Evaluate the social, cultural, and environmental consequences of the development of nuclear arsenals and the so-called “peaceful” applications of nuclear technologies.
• Compare ethnographic and historical cases from diverse sociopolitical and geographical contexts, understanding how perceptions of technology, risk, and justice vary.
• Develop critical thinking and independent research skills through the study of primary and secondary sources, aiming to understand complex issues such as environmental injustice, toxicity, coloniality of knowledge, and the politics of technology.
• Communicate their ideas effectively in both written and oral form, supporting their arguments with academic evidence and ethnographic or historical sources.

General Competences: The course aims to:

• develop critical thinking
• enhance the ability to distinguish facts from opinions
• promote free, creative, and deductive thinking
• search for, analyse, and synthesise data and information using the necessary technologies
• foster respect for diversity and multiculturalism
• enhance the ability to conduct research independently
• offer practice in academic research and delivering academic presentations

• Abraham, Itty. 2006. “The Ambivalence of Nuclear Histories.” Osiris 21(1): 49–65.
• Biello, David. 2013. “How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming.” Scientific American, 12 December 2013.
• Brown, Kate. 2013. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Part Three: 165–267.
• Creager, Angela. 2006. “Nuclear Energy in the Service of Biomedicine: The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Radioisotope Program, 1946-1950.” Journal of the History of Biology 39(4): 649–684.
• Goatcher, Jeff, and Viv Brunsden. 2011. “Chernobyl and the Sublime Tourist.” Tourist Studies 11(2): 115–137.
• Goldstein, Donna M., and Magdalena E. Stawkowski. 2015. “James V. Neel and Yuri E. Dubrova: Cold War Debates and the Genetic Effects of Low-Dose Radiation.” Journal of the History of Biology 48(1): 67–98.
• Harper, Janice. 2005. “Another Roadside Attraction? Preserving the Cultural Heritage of Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” Anthropology in Action 12(3): 34–53.
• Hecht, Gabrielle. 2010. “The Power of Nuclear Things.” Technology and Culture 51(1): 1–30.
• Hecht, Gabrielle. 2012. “The Work of Invisibility: Radiation Hazards and Occupational Health in South African Uranium Production.” International Labor and Working-Class History 81: 94–113.
• Ialenti, Vincent. 2020. “Spectres of Seppo: The Afterlives of Finland’s Nuclear Waste Experts.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26(2): 251–268.
• Krige, John. 2006. “Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence.” Osiris 21(1): 161–181.
• Kuchinskaya, Olga. 2011. “Articulating the Signs of Danger: Lay Experiences of Post-Chernobyl Radiation Risks and Effects.” Public Understanding of Science 20(3): 405–421.
• Macfarlane, Allison M., and Rodney C. Ewing. 2006. Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Introduction: 1–26.]
• Masco, Joseph. 2004. “Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post-Cold War New Mexico.” Cultural Anthropology 19(4): 517–550.
• Masco, Joseph. 2009. “Life Underground: Building the Bunker Society.” Anthropology Now 1(2): 13–29.
• Miller, Steven E., and Scott D. Sagan. 2010. “Alternative Nuclear Futures.” Daedalus 139(1), 126–137.
• Olma, Nikolaos. 2023. “Situating Uranium Industrialism: Uranium Production and Epistemic Injustice in Soviet-era Mailuu-Suu.” Saeculum: Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte 73(2): 233-262.
• Petryna, Adriana. 2004. “Biological Citizenship: The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-Exposed Populations.” Osiris 19(1): 250–265.
• Polleri, Maxime. 2019. “Conflictual Collaboration: Citizen Science and the Governance of Radioactive Contamination After the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster.” American Ethnologist 46(2): 214–226.
• Purvis-Roberts, Kathleen L., Cynthia A. Werner, and Irene Frank. 2007. “Perceived Risks from Radiation and Nuclear Testing Near Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan: A Comparison Between Physicians, Scientists, and the Public.” Risk Analysis 27(2): 291–302.
• Stawkowski, Magdalena E. 2016. “‘I Am a Radioactive Mutant’: Emergent Biological Subjectivities at Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site.” American Ethnologist 43(1): 144–157.
• Stawkowski, Magdalena E. 2017. “Radiophobia Had to be Reinvented.” Culture, Theory and Critique 58(4): 357–374.
• Todeschini, Maya. 1999. “Illegitimate Sufferers: A-Bomb Victims, Medical Science, and the Government.” Daedalus 128(2): 67–100.
• Voyles, Traci Brynne. 2015. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in the Navajo Country. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. [Preface: vi–xv; Introduction: 1–26.]
• Walker, J. Samuel. 2004. Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Chapter 10: “The Long-Term Effects of Three Mile Island,” 209–244.]