Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure

by Jacob Darwin Hamblin (Editor), Linda Marie Richards (Editor)

Many of the effects of nuclear fallout and radiation have been intentionally hidden by governments around the world. Public knowledge has been driven by activists demanding recognition and justice. Many Downwinders fought for years, in the press and in the courts, to have their health and environmental concerns taken seriously. Just as radiation is invisible, many of these stories continue to be unseen.

From 2017 to 2020, Jacob Hamblin and Linda Richards facilitated the Oregon State University Downwinders Project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, to support research and scholarship on the Downwinders cases near the Hanford nuclear site in Washington. Additionally, each summer the project team sponsored a workshop that brought a variety of stakeholders together to explore the science, history, and lived history of radiation exposure. These workshops took a broad view of nuclear contamination, beyond Hanford, beyond the United States, and beyond academia. Community members and activists presented their testimonies and creative work alongside scholars studying exposure worldwide.

Making the Unseen Visible collects some of the best work arising from the project and its workshops. Scholarly research chapters and reflective essays cover topics and experiences ranging from colonial nuclear testing in North Africa to uranium mining in the Navajo Nation and battles over public memory around Hanford. Scholarship on nuclear topics has largely happened on a case study basis, focusing on individual disasters or locations. Making the Unseen Visible brings a variety of current community and scholarly work together to create a clearer, larger web uniting nuclear humanities research across time and geography.

400 pages, Paperback

Published November 30, 2023

About the author

Jacob Darwin Hamblin is a historian who writes about science, technology, and the environment. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and many publications devoted to the history of science, technology, and the natural world. He currently resides in the American Pacific Northwest, where he is a professor of history at Oregon State University.

Reviews

[MEJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Invisibility does not just apply to radiation itself, but to the narratives we create about the lives of people connected to it.”

…

“A 1991 study by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated 2.4 million preventable and unnecessary deaths due to global nuclear weapons testing and fallout alone. We may never fully see these casualties. But we need to try. Downwinders and other affected communities have comorbidities, enhancing their risks to illness. But they also have knowledge to provide, about what it is like to live in that pain, in a space where maladies have no name.”

***

Beautiful collection that explores how radiation's invisibility parallels the ways its victims are continually overlooked and ignored. I loved the mixture of personal essays & academic ones. My favorites:

* The Town That Fell Asleep: Malignant Infrastructures of Soviet-era Nuclear Ruins in Kazakhstan

* How to Hide a Nuclear Explosion: French Secrets about Saharan Fallout across Decolonizing Africa

* Nuclear Weapons, Ionizing Radiation, and the Principle of Unnecessary Suffering

* Playing Games on the Graves of the Dead: Commemoration, Forgetting, and Ways of Knowing in Richland, Washington