The Feminist, Anti-Colonial, Anti-Imperial Nuclear Gathering (FACING Nuclear) brings together people from various disciplines, places and practices who are engaging in critical, community-relevant research that attends to questions of nuclear justice, climate justice and their intersections.
The gathering’s commitments are marked by a shared refusal to reproduce the imaginary excision between peaceful/sustainable nuclear energy and violent/unsustainable nuclear weapons. Instead, we begin from a shared understanding that nuclear imperialism is sustained by this imaginary excision. We recognize the role of uranium-fueled infrastructures (shared by both nuclear weapons and nuclear power technologies) and uranium-derived nuclear pollution in sustaining nuclear imperialism. We also recognize the central role nuclear colonialism and colonial land and water relations play in legitimizing ongoing nuclear pollution and sustaining the nuclear imperial infrastructures that sustain nuclear imperialism.
FACING Nuclear is committed to strengthening and supporting community leaders and organizers’ efforts to illustrate and address the adverse impacts of nuclear pollution and nuclear imperial infrastructures across multiple scales, locations, and temporalities. We are also committed to supporting researchers engaging in critical nuclear scholarship, who may be gaslit, shamed or silenced for refusing dominant nuclear imperial logics.
The gathering takes an expansive view of engagement, advancing critical insights into topics including methodology, theory, writing, activism, and the politics of collaboration. Our hope is that this mode of engagement will foster generative conversations across disciplines and geographies by troubling the notions of power, crisis, sustainability, colonialism, scarcity, risk, and harm that shape thinking around nuclear matters.
Structuring Questions
- What histories and power relations are inside of the contemporary global nuclear crisis?
- How do we make visible the imperceptible dimensions of nuclear matters?
- How do we engage in critical conversations about nuclear issues within dominant knowledge hierarchies that actively perpetuate epistemic injustice, colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism and epistemicide?
- How do critical nuclear scholars navigate experiences of gaslighting within academia and public spaces?
- How do nuclear crises and their solutions maintain existing power structures?
- What are different ways of understanding criticality and crisis within the field of nuclear studies?
- How do we articulate and address the complex entanglements between nuclear colonialism/justice and climate colonialism/justice?
- What might feminist, anti-colonial and anti-imperial solutions to our current nuclear crises look like in practice?
facingnuclear.com 